Day 53

I enjoy Facebook in the way an anthropologist might enjoy studying the artifacts of a lost culture. Even as she participates, she is detached, an observer looking for clues that shed light on the habits and values of the people.

This morning I read an exchange between two people, one of whom I know: a friend and colleague from graduate school. The other person was an apparent family friend, praising her for her academic accomplishments and her intellectual prowess. My friend responded by saying that her mother and grandmother instilled in her a love of knowledge and that her accomplishments were an effort to do right by them.

The statement struck me as inauthentic. It was a sound bite, a rhetorical move, a discursive tent pole propping up a larger narrative. It reminded me of the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. Little George could not tell a lie. Yet the story itself was a lie, concocted in service to a narrative, a narrative intended to bestow a honor upon a man and his nation.

I have always had this longing for something authentic. Even as I write these words I'm not sure what they mean. As a writer, if I decide to write about a pond, I can choose to peer at the surface and report only on my reflection or I can plunge my arm into the frigid water and feel around in the icy depths. I suppose that's what it means to me to be authentic; it means feeling around in the dark and telling the truth about the murky undertow.

Like my friend I just completed an advanced degree. It wasn't for me a quest for knowledge. It was a hiding place, a safe retreat from the world. I used to tell myself that I started college with a noble purpose: to support my family. But now, when I allow myself to go back, to slip inside the skin of the girl I was at 21, I realize that I wasn't running toward a life of scholarship, I was running away from my life as a wife and a mother. I had already failed at home, but school was a place where I could succeed, where I could be a winner; a place where I could put my shame aside for a few hours at a time.

I do not possess many gifts as a writer. I have never demonstrated the poetic sensibilities of Toni Morrison or Kim Barnes, nor am I a master storyteller with a genius imagination, like Steven King. My only gift is this longing for authenticity; this desire to tell the truth. For most of my life I have carried it like a burden. I am learning to treasure it now.