Just Live It

One morning this summer I was feeding Gus, and as he dozed I started to read an article about the writer Somerset Maugham in the latest issue of The New Yorker.  I usually adore their profiles on artists and tend to PASS OUT with EXCITEMENT when I see the category “Life and Letters” appear in their table of contents, because I find that reading about artistic lives is like a kind of CRACK to me.  Oh DELICIOUS inspired lives!  HIT ME with your best shot of someone else’s process!  Well, that’s USUALLY how it goes.  Yesterday, as I began to read, a sort of impatience knocked the magazine out of my hands. I couldn’t take it and I heard these words blare in my brain: I DON’T NEED ANOTHER EXAMPLE, I need to BE that example!

Ever since I fell in love with the writer Sylvia Plath when I was 17, I’ve been obsessed with reading or watching the artist’s life.  Over the years, this has morphed and expanded into different arenas, like reading creativity or inspiration books, but it’s still the same part of my brain that craves to touch the light, the heat I see in artist’s lives.  The reasons to indulge in this sort of activity have changed, and in the last few years I have told myself when I start to read about SOMEBODY ELSE living what I dream of: I just need to know that what I want is possible.  HA!  With the amount of books, articles, movies, etc. that I have read or watched, POSSIBILITY isn’t the question!  THOUSANDS have done it, so the question isn’t CAN I do it, but WILL I TRY?

Tina Turner was right: we don’t need another hero.

As some interviews have trickled in about my new book Great Gals: Inspired Ideas for Living a Kick-Ass Life one of the questions that has come up is about the overall philosophy of the book–which is to acknowledge and honor the lives we are living RIGHT THIS SECOND and not when we reach some idealized level in some idealized future.  Yes “great” women are featured in the book, but so are their fears, their struggles, their chances, as well as their triumphs. It all looks so good in retrospect, but I can tell you that every single woman in that book experiences/experienced chaos, boredom, worry, doubt, loss, confusion, heartbreak, vanity, you name it.  I can feel so stuck in my life and project whatever story of success on people I admire or look up to–it is SO EASY to forget that it is NEVER easy for anyone.

I think too often we hand over our desires, dreams, and actions to “experts,”–to those we perceive as great or gifted or special.  At most we think, I could do that, but then…we don’t.  It’s easier to give it up, to get lost in the distance we see between where we are and where we want to be.  I get lost in there all the time, but it’s really just another story I make up so I don’t feel scared. The truth is, no one is living THE great life, so don’t worry about it being taken already.  There’s room for you and there’s room for me.  Stop leaving it up to the experts, don’t wait to know how to do it.  Just live it.