As I paced out the bookstore, waiting for it to open, I typed the following search terms in my phone's browser: how to embrace feedback, vulnerability. As many experienced patients, I knew what my problem was.
In Grade 8, I got 11/20 for my first French dictation. I still remember that it said something about mummies and their "bandelettes". I cried like it was the end of the world. It did feel like the end, not of "the" world, but perhaps of "a" world, the world in which I was a model pupil whose composition the teacher would cite as an example in Chinese class.
That dreadful feeling of being inadequate in an unknown world is one that I have learned to mask growing up. That was why, when I went to audition for that high school of mine, just a few months before the fateful dictation, I had answered, sternly, "No!" to the question from a friendly onlooker: "are you feeling nervous?" Not because I didn't feel nervous -- I had been nervous as hell -- but because my limited French vocabulary didn't include "nerveuse", so I categorically rejected any jeopardizing statement that could initiate more conversation about that unfamiliar word.
Admitting my own insufficiency felt unsafe. And the most mine-laden territory was one that I cared about the most, one that is most intimately wound around my ego: my work as a writer. So is it any surprise that I never read the feedback that was mailed to me in an envelope for a creative writing class that I took part in many years ago? And that subsequent abandon of writing for the eyes of others?
"Or could there be a payoff in her not finishing works and, thereby, not testing the limits of her talent? Perhaps she wanted to perpetuate the belief that she could have done great things if only she had wished. Perhaps there was something attractive in the idea that if she had wanted, she might have been a great artist. Perhaps no artistic piece quite reached the level she demanded of herself."
— Irvin D. Yalom, from Staring at the Sun
I no longer wish to be a writer, not one that lives in a shoe-box Parisian flat and writes shrewd commentary on human nature, at any rate, but a great deal of my sense of self still revolves around the written words that I produce, be it a technical study of gas and power supply chain or a prose "poem" that surface now and then. So maybe you can guess what was weighing on my mind when I received feedback on my draft for a yet-to-be-published paper, one in which I have exposed all that I knew on the subject and the reviewers were people whose work I admired... "What if they found it ridiculous? What if they have torn it to pieces?" That feeling of devastation was already brewing... For eighteen hours, I avoided opening that document and distracted myself. But the moment of truth had to come, sooner or later.
When I was rejected by MIT, my dream school then, more than eight years ago, I posted a little poem about an unmarked box under their "Not Admitted" blog post, commiserating with other non-admitted.
You know how they deal with those kind of things.
They try to coat it with a sincere apology,
then they wrap it up with layers of tissue papers, soft and fluffy,
then they put it into a little box,
and, finally, they put it under your pillow.
For days and nights, you sleep on it, and you dream about it.
Sometimes your dream looks happy, sometimes sad,but always fuzzy.
You don't know what's in that box, you are obsessed with it, but you don't want to know.
It feels like that the little box has been there forever.
Its content is an eternal speck of dust, insignificant but unchangeable:
whether you open the box or not will never change the thing inside.
When you, with trembling hands, decide to unwrap the box,the air you breath thins out.
At last, when you see that speck of dust,like thousands of people before you,you let out a little cry.
You know it is just dust.
You stare at it and the dreams you've had for days and nights all burst at once.
Their corpse flow upstream to gather at one point in your throat so it becomes swollen and itchy.
And, at the same time, the weight of your soul diminishes.
Not much, it only loses a tiny speck of dust,
a little dust who dies with the thought that it isn't wanted.
Posted by: Donna on March 17, 2007
Many years later, I read another poem about unmarked boxes, and it is one that I would like to share with you today:
Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round
in another form. The child weaned from mother’s milk
now drinks wine and honey mixed.
God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flower bed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open
Part of the self leaves the body when we sleep
and changes shape. You might say, “Last night
I was a cypress tree, a small bed of tulips,
a field of grapevines.” Then the phantasm goes away.
You’re back in the room.
I don’t want to make any one fearful.
Hear what’s behind what I say.
Tatatumtum tatum tatadum.
There’s the light gold of wheat in the sun
and the gold of bread made from that wheat.
I have neither. I’m only talking about them,
as a town in the desert looks up
at stars on a clear night.
Translated by Coleman Barks.
I am still terribly scared of unmarked boxes, but I am getting better at opening them.