Self Reflection | Personal Growth
Seeing Family and Old Friends Made me Realize How Much I Miss Them
Because careers and friendships shouldn’t compete
I tend to be ravenous about advancing my career. Every year, every opportunity I snatch or miss is always an occasion for obsessing about what I could have done better. And while I love my family and friends, I don’t always show them what they mean to me.
Now, I’m reaching an age where I think much more about who I want to be as much as what I want to do as an artist. Finding myself at dinner last week with friends as I reached my birthday, I had to think for a minute when a friend asked if I had any thoughts on where I’m going.
The first thing I thought about was that it’s been too long since I’ve seen the people I grew up with or who I became friends with during my twenties. The time I spent with everyone shows me how strong you can become when surrounded by people you’ve known for a while. In my usual day-to-day routines, I take walks, write, eat, talk on the phone, do errands, and send emails, but have to work harder to connect with people.
When I’m visiting good friends and family, we’re able to pick up where we left off instantly, and our lives reflect that closeness. I’m lucky to have a husband and even luckier to say we are happy after more than two decades together. Would life be perfect if I were nearer to other relatives and friends? No, because nothing is perfect. But it would be a whole lot closer to the kind of life I’m looking for.
What I discovered during the past two weeks about the people I love: When we are together, we share everything. We are braver, funnier, stronger, more perceptive.
Do they miss me as much as I miss them? I don’t really know. I can say it felt enormously good to be with them and made me second-guess my choice to move to the Midwest many years ago.
Originally, I moved for my first husband’s work opportunities and then found my own career blossoming after being accepted into the Playwrights’ Center. If you had asked me years ago about what I wanted most, I would have said without hesitation, that I wanted to be known for my writing career. Now I wonder why I wasn’t at least as committed to my family and friendships.
Of course, when I am writing, it always feels like I am talking to someone. I once saw a postcard that said, “All art is penance,” and it made me laugh, but I think art is really about therapy and analyzing the situations that make us who we are.
“I write for myself and strangers,” Gertrude Stein said, and of course, she was right, we cannot really write for our friends, because we can’t worry about what the people we know think of us. We have to be our most honest, stripped-down selves — and that means revealing who we are to people who don’t have expectations about us.
It means the world to me to be able to write and decide what I want to write, and why. Yet the act of writing, and being an artist, is also a lonely one. As Ursula Le Guin wrote, “As a writer, you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.”
She’s right, but what if I don’t want to be lonely anymore? What if time is running short altogether, and I have only limited time left with family and friends? And yes, I can say the same about writing.
As I write this, I can feel autumn calling for me to pick up all the threads of my books and plays and ideas and weave them into stories. It’s time for me to see plays and feed those theatrical experiences into my own artistic life.
It’s also time for me to create new songs and work with new composers. To find new subjects and figure out what they mean to me. To meet new people who can help me get to the next rung on whatever ladder I’m climbing.
Still, part of me is back in August, breathing in the smiles of friends; late snacks on the porch, strolls through art galleries and parks and city streets and fields full of flowers. Part of me never wants to leave those places, because leaving means I have to take a good, long look at what I’m doing and continue working.
I can’t help it. I want to play.
Around me, in news stories and podcasts and conversations, are the successes of others. Those successes make me want to work harder and tell me I can’t get there by lounging around with friends. What I hope is that this birthday will give me the time I need to explore who I am as an artist.
It feels like work, but does it have to be?
Can this next year be about what I want to tell myself and strangers, who are, by extension, friends of a different sort? Can it be about being playful, energetic, an explorer of sorts? Like some of the friends I saw, I have money worries, and I often let those worries hold me down.
Looking out the window just before I left for home, I could see the colors of fall starting to peek out into the landscape. At home today, I see green leaves triumphing over any sign of fall. The seasons don’t worry about expectations. They just rotate, without a thought. Why can’t I be more like them?
I want to be less careful; I want to take more risks, both personally and with my work. I want to start a schedule of at least three to four hours of writing a day and carve out part of the week for friends and groups.
Can I do that? I need to, so it can’t be any other way. September is here, and summer nearly over. How many years left? Impossible to count. But I do know it’s time to be more of who I want to be.
Writer. Artist. Wife, mother, cousin, aunt, Showing up when I’m supposed to.
As myself.
