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Dear Babygirl,

I’m looking at the clock on the wall now (you know that clock, the one with the angels you say are like the ones that watch over you), and it says it’s almost 1:00. Almost 1:00 on January 18. I know the date means a lot to you—birthdays are like that—but it’s the time that I’m holding onto now. Because as I see it, for the next twelve minutes and thirty-seven seconds, you’ll still be nine years old. When 1:05 rolls around, you’ll be ten.

Ten.

Honestly, that’s hard for me to wrap my head around. It’s a big deal, turning double digits. In the words of your grandfather, you’re “Gettin up there.” True. But I think you’ve been gettin up there for a while now, and it just takes days like this for me to really see it. To really see the person you’re becoming.

I’ll admit it isn’t easy, watching you grow. There are times when I want to put my hand atop your head and push down as hard as I can in the hopes you’ll stay small forever. Sometimes I think it would be better that way. Sometimes I think that you’d do well to never have to grow up and see this world for what it truly is, that it would be best if you continued to think everyone always got along and everything always turned out right. But I know that can’t happen. We’re all meant for greater things, you especially, and that means having to go through a little bit of the darkness on the way to the light. No worries there, though. But I’ll get to that.

I figure since you’re double digits and all, I can maybe say some things you have thus far in your life not been privy to. I remember I was about your age when I realized my father wasn’t a super hero. He wasn’t really the smartest man in the world, or the strongest, or even the toughest. He was just a man. That’s a hard thing for ten-year-old to accept. Harder for me, because I had to find all that out on my own. But since being a parent is all about turning your own mistakes around so that your kids won’t have to stumble into those same holes, I’m going to help you out with that. Call it an extra present, one that will go well with the notebooks and pens and books you unwrapped this morning before school.

Ten years ago tomorrow, your mother and I brought you home for the first time. And though you don’t know this—and maybe could never believe it—I was scared to death. I didn’t know how to be a father. I’d asked around plenty—asked both your grandfathers, asked friends, strangers, preachers, anyone—but usually the only bit of advice I received was a wry smile and something along the lines of, “Don’t worry about it. You’ll know what to do.”

I didn’t know what to do.

Which was how I found myself awake all night, creeping over to your bassinet to prod and poke your little body just to make sure you were still breathing.

I’ve gotten a little better over the years, but you know what? I’m still scared. Scared every day. I don’t think that’s a bad thing (I think a lot of kids would be better off if their parents were a little more afraid for them), but it’s something you need to know. Because I’m not a super hero, either. I’m just a man.

But I’m a man who loves you. And I dare say no other man in the world could ever love you more.

You remember that. Keep it close. Guard it. Because the world is coming, and the world’s the kind of thing that will let you stroke it until it purrs and then turn and bite you for no reason. It takes faith to get by in this life, faith and hope and love. You have all of those things. I’ll make sure you always do, just like I’ll always make sure the monsters aren’t under your bed and the ghosts aren’t in your closet.

Because that’s what good fathers do.

Happy birthday.

Love,

Daddy

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Kid down the road got a new skateboard for Christmas, a bright red one with orange flames, white wheels, and tiny metal blocks underneath that spark when scraped against the pavement. He’s been riding around the neighborhood on it every day since. Doesn’t matter how cold it is or if the mountains have driven down black, snow-laced clouds. He’ll still ride by. Every day after school, and most every day during the weekend.

Of course the skateboard hasn’t faired well in the process. The red has now begun to fade, and the orange flames are now a dull ochre. The metal blocks will still spark—I can see them doing so in the early evenings as he rides by—but now they come more as puffs of light than showers of fire. I suppose this is by design. I’ve heard stakeboarders abhor the new and shiny. The used and scuffed is much more appealing.

I’ll watch him. I’ll even go so far as to say that once I see him pass my living room window once, I’ll pause at that window until he rides by again. It’s the way he does it, you see. The way he rides.

He’s not flashy. I’m not sure if this is his first board, though I’m inclined to believe it is. He’s of the age when the world widens at the seams and expands beyond his home and his block. He can ride now. He can explore. He can race down the slight incline of the hill and feel the wind in his face. It is freedom, and it is good.

It’s too bad that one of these days he’ll likely get clobbered by a passing vehicle. Again, it’s the way he rides—in the middle of the street, through stop signs, jumping curbs, like a miniature Evel Knievel. I don’t want you to believe I watch him out of some admiration, some envy. No, I watch him because I’m scared to death for him.

Also, because I used to be him.

Call it a boy thing, though I’m sure girls aren’t immune. They play and romp and do all manner of reckless things, all seemingly without care or thought of consequence, all because they are convinced of their immortality. Nothing will happen to them. Nothing can. Because they’re going to live forever.

That was me.

I once jumped off the roof of the house with an umbrella, thinking it would make a cool parachute. It didn’t work. Once I caught the breath that had been knocked out of me by the hard ground, I tried it again.

I once rappelled down a two-story set of stairs using a jump rope attached to a combination lock.

And there was the time when after watching a re-run of Happy Days, I tried jumping over four empty garbage cans on my bike. I managed one and a half.

Why did I do these things? Stupidity is the first thing that comes to mind (I had, and have, that in abundance). But the truth is that I honestly thought nothing could go wrong. Nothing bad would ever happen.

Now I’m older. Now I’m a husband and a father. Now I know the bad things that can and do happen, often without the slightest provocation, and often through no fault of my own. I think as we get older the glow in the world begins to fade and light because dusk. I think we begin to see shadows, that lurking What If. And I think we ponder the worst that can happen so much that the best that can happen goes ignored.

I think sometimes we worry so much about the traffic that we don’t allow ourselves to feel the wind in our face and know the freedom to simply be.

Age robs us of more than just our strength and our innocence. It also demands our boldness. If anything, that’s something I’d like to reclaim. I’d like to recapture that sense of immortality, even if it is a false one.

I know this: in a few short minutes I expect to see a young boy fly by on his skateboard, and when he does I will instinctively look for an approaching car. But I will also root him on, and I will see the wind in his face.

He came to me on New Years Eve as I stood outside gazing up at the stars—not so much a person (and not so much a light, as the Book says he can appear), but as a shadow in my own thoughts. He stood with me there beneath the moon and Venus and Orion, saying nothing at first, letting me speak because he can do no damage unless invited first.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

And he answered that he was roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.

“You still do that?”

Oh yes, he answered, oh yes indeed, I have done so for ages and will for ages more. Nothing gives me greater pleasure.

“Not many people believe in you anymore,” I told him. “You know that, right?”

He was well aware of that. In fact, he surprised me by saying that was what he wanted. It made things easier, he said, when it came to his work.

“Guess this is a pretty rough time of the year for you, huh?” I smiled as I said that, not because it was funny but because it was true. “You must hate Christmas more than the ACLU.”

True, he said. Christmas and Easter were not his favorite things. And he confessed that it was not so much the joy and peace that bothered him as it was the hope. He said he hated hope most of all. But tonight was New Years, and there was no better time for him.

“Why’s that?”

Really? he asked, and in my mind I saw him shake his head in wonder. You really don’t know? Why, think about it. How many people this moment are huddled together in bars and at parties with drinks in their hands? How many right now are making their resolutions (he told me he loved resolutions almost as much as our nonbelief) and promising themselves they will do better this time around? As if things could change so easily just with the turning of the calendar!

He chuckled then, and there was a chill in his laugh that even the December wind could not match.

How many people out there want nothing more than to put this year behind them? he asked me. How many want to drink those memories away? And how many think this next year will be everything this year wasn’t? I’ll change, they say. I’ll do better. But in the end it never works, and do you know why?

“Why?”

Because change hurts. Because change won’t come until it hurts more to stay the same than it does to become something different. And that’s where I win. People will endure a plain life even if they want something more, because a plain life is a painless one.

He said something else to me then. It was soft and swallowed by the wind, but I think he said that he will always win so long as we believe we are ordinary. I’m almost positive that’s what he said.

He left me then under the stars. Midnight came and went, bringing with it another year—365 days that promise the same hope and fear and longing that every year before it has held.

I hope he doesn’t come back, even though I know he will. He comes to us all sooner or later, whether we believe in him or not.

This I know: the hope I long for and the change I want in myself won’t come as easy as the turning of a calendar page. It will be hard for me. For you, too. It will often hurt and sometimes seem impossible. But I think that’s how it should be.

None of us should want a plain life.

Because none of us are ordinary.

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I knew sleep wouldn’t come for me when my wife said, “Your face is melting.”

It came easy enough for her—she rolled over right and was gone in seconds, before I could even reply. Which I suppose was a good thing. How could I have responded to that? The only thing I could have said was roll over and get some sleep, which she did.

It’s unsettling to hear something like that from an otherwise rational person—“Your face is melting.” And it’s downright fearful when it comes from someone who only hours before had been in surgery to have an organ removed.

Thanks to modern medicine, these days few patients actually stay overnight in the hospital. I learned that today. I also learned that the things doctors and nurses tell you when you’re taking that patient home can scare the living bejesus out of you. They said to watch for leakage from her bandages, cautioned me not to let her toss about in bed, said there would be pain and a bit of mental discombobulation. They did not say it would appear to her that my face is melting.

So I knew sleep wouldn’t come. And now, four hours later, it still hasn’t.

A lack of weariness has little to do with why I’m still awake. I’m tired. And I’m not still awake because I need to make sure she’s still breathing, even though that’s what I’m doing. I know that sounds ridiculous, but in those small hours of the night what is ridiculous has a funny way of becoming what is important.

No, I’m awake because I’m afraid. Pure and simple. And just as being afraid is a choice, so too is my decision not to sleep.

I will be awake all night. That isn’t a problem. I’m a writer and a father; sleepless nights go with the territory. I have a pot of coffee in the kitchen, some chapters to edit, and reruns of Frasier on the television. I’m set.

I’ve prayed. I think there’s a validity to the notion that God hears the prayers of the desperate a little clearer than anyone else’s, if only because those supplications spring forth from a sense of helplessness and humility. I prayed that there would be no leakage, that she would not toss, that her pain would go away and that she would not get sicker. But those words tasted like pennies in my mouth. I suppose that’s a symptom of fear as well—when you pray, it’s not to ask for good things to happen but to ask that bad things won’t.

She’s still breathing, still keeping still. Frasier has just lost yet another in a long line of loves. That he did so in a humorous way doesn’t make me laugh as it usually does. I just see his loneliness and know what a powerful thing that is, and I know that life isn’t the bulwark we make it to be. It is fragile and can be snatched away at any time, and that is why I am afraid. It is a choice that does not feel like a choice.

The problem is that I want to sleep. I want to close my eyes right now and wake in the morning to find I’ve stopped writing mid-sentence, because then I will know that I chose faith over fear. That I let God and his angels tend to my wife and not my worry.

But I can’t.

My son said this evening that he’s happy his mother his home. He said there are angels here. He’s seen them. He’s said once he even heard one. He said the angel didn’t talk so much as sing, and that it sounded like a wave pulling back into the ocean over a million tiny shells.

I wish I could hear that song now.

Maybe I can. Maybe I just have to sit here and listen hard enough. Maybe the point isn’t to never feel fear, but to see fear for what it is: the large shadow of a tiny thing.

Maybe it’s enough to know the angels are here and God is here and—

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The thing about Halloween is that it’s all fine and dandy until bedtime. Before then, it’s dressing up and walking around outside at night and “Trick or treat!” and candy. After, once the candy has been sorted and costumes have been exchanged for pajamas, there is only the darkness and whatever may live in it.

I’ve learned this firsthand.

Like me, my children enjoy a good ghost story. They enjoy tales of eerie things, impossible things, things that make you wonder. I think that even more than the candy is why they enjoy this day. But of course it’s easier to hear of those things that go bump in the night while the light of day is still burning. When you’re alone in bed through the window is only the waxing moon and tree branches that look like reaching arms, you don’t do much wondering. You just think it’s real.

Say what you want about the innocence of Halloween—of the fantasy and fun—but at it’s core, this is a day of fear. It is a day in which the young and the young in spirit no longer avoid their dreads and anxieties, they face them. It is the only day of the year when it’s socially acceptable to both be afraid and believe in the supernatural.

It’s the former rather than the latter that will keep me up tonight long after the porch light is off and I’ve managed to convince the kids there is nothing lurking beneath their beds. It’s why I’ll be watching everything from zombies to ghosts to vampires. Because sometimes I need that certain something to blow off a little steam. To get it all out. To tell myself that it’s okay I’m afraid.

Not supposed to feel that sort of thing. I’ve never been the type of guy to get all gushy with my feelings. I’m old school—John Wayne rather than…well, most any male movie star today. That means I swallow my frustrations, I bury my pain, and I hide my doubts. Whatever ulcers or chest pains result I chalk up to that great excuse of That’s Just The Way Life Is.

But of course sometimes I can’t swallow every bit of frustration. Some of that pain pokes through. Some of my doubts are found. Nobody’s perfect. But rare is the occasion when I will show fear. Ask anyone who knows me. They’ll vouch for that statement.

Want to know something that’s sad and funny at the same time? If you’d up my doubts, my pains, and my frustrations, they wouldn’t even come close to my fears.

I’m afraid a lot.

I know how the world is. I know there are ghosts out there. I see them every day, people who have been mislaid in the nether regions of the past and present, so haunted by what they’ve done that what they do seems meaningless.

And I know there are zombies, people who have traded dreams for convenience and have taken adversity as God’s refusal, who have surrendered purpose for pleasure.

And I know there are monsters. Many monsters. Evil, soulless monsters devoid of honor and love and compassion, and who would gladly harm me or my family simply because of the color of our skin or the country of our birth or the God to whom we pray.

Ours is a haunted world, one in which the ghouls and beasts are not hemmed in by night or silver bullets, but have free reign.

Tell me it’s wrong to be afraid. I dare you.

So for tonight at least, for better or worse, I will sit and watch stories of the unreal that I may deal with very real feelings. And tomorrow, also for better or worse, I will put on my brave face and greet the world again.

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A family down the road loves Halloween almost as much as I do. Mother, father, and son—Mikey is his name. Mikey’s seven.

Mikey already has his costume picked out—it’s Jack Sparrow this year—and already has his pumpkin carved. All that’s left are the decorations. Mikey’s folks get a kick out of decorating for Halloween.

But as with most things in life, all this excitement and elation is sprinkled with dread. Decorating for Halloween, you see, means having to get the decorations out. Not a problem usually, but in Mikey’s case it’s a big one. Because all the decorations are in his basement.

All of that old and mostly forgotten stuff down there gives Mikey the willies. It’s scary down there, he’s told me. Dark and stinky, too. It’s where the spiders and mice and ghosts live. Also the furnace, which he believes may well be the gateway to hell. When you’re a kid, nothing is scarier than the furnace.

At night before bed, Mikey doesn’t worry about the front or back doors being locked, he worries about the basement door. He’s seen the movies (though he won’t fess up to me which movies he’s talking about) and knows what can happen. He’s not afraid of someone coming in, he’s afraid of something coming up. But there’s a problem. The lock is on the inside of the door, not the outside. The builder’s mistake, on that his father never gotten around to fixing. Which means the spiders and mice and ghosts can keep everything in, but Mikey can’t keep them out.

So when the first week of October rolls around, he’s both elated and scared to death. His father expects Mikey to go down there with him. He has to help unpack it all, too. And lay it all out right there on the basement floor. “You never know what’s going to be in there,” he told me. “Spiders love to crawl in those boxes. Zombies, too. I seen em.”

This fear, this dread, is Mikey’s alone. He hasn’t told his parents about the basement, and how he worries about the lock on the basement door before he goes to bed, and how he prays that eventually his dad will change the lock around to the other side so he could get in but they couldn’t get out. It’d make him seem like a kid. And when you’re a kid, the last thing you want is to act like one.

Me, I understand all of this. The kid part, but especially the basement stuff. I might not have a basement in my house, but I do have one inside of me. Deep down, seldom seen. It’s the place where all the junk is kept, the fears and worries and failures. The sins I’ve committed and the regrets I have.

It’s a mess, my basement. Junky and moldy and dark. I suspect things crawl around down there, too. And there are ghosts. Plenty of ghosts.

I’m not alone here. Flip through your Bible and you’ll find plenty of people with junky basements. Moses had one, what with that murder charge and all. David too, with the whole Bathsheba in the bathtub incident. Peter when he denied Christ after saying he never would. And let’s not forget Paul, who had the blood of hundreds and maybe thousands of Christians on his hands. They found out, like we do, that living with junk in the basement is tough and scary.

They also found out that God can clean those basements up. He can get rid of the junk, scrub everything down, and chase away all the nasties. Problem is, He won’t do it alone. We have to open the door to let Him in. Because like the Mikey’s house down the road, there are locks on our basement doors, and they all lock from the inside.

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An important part of my nighttime routine is making a final pass through the house. I make sure the doors are locked and the outside light is on. Make sure the morning coffee is ready—it’s the smell of coffee and not the sound of the alarm that gets me out of bed—and the lights above the sink are shining—just in case someone wakes in the middle of the night thirsty. I’ll check to make sure my son is adequately covered and hasn’t flopped and flipped his blankets off. My final stop is to check my daughter’s sugar, because she may sleep and we all may sleep, but diabetes never does.

I always pray over my children then. Every night, without fail. They don’t know this; I’ve never told them. I suppose doing so is as much for my benefit as theirs. I have an uneasy relationship with the night. It’s the time of day when I often get most of my work done, and yet I spend much of that time peering into the shadows for what isn’t there.

My prayers are the usual ones—help us to sleep well, bless our family, let Your angels stand guard. And keep us safe, always that. Always a lot of that.

I heard a preacher the other day talk about praying for safety. He said Christians shouldn’t place so much of a premium on that, that this is pretty much one of the safest countries in the world and so we’re pretty much wasting our words, that we should instead pray for boldness because that’s what we need more. He said we’re often content to remain where we are because that’s where everything is safe and familiar, when God wants us to go forth and conquer new lands within and without.

I’ll admit he stepped on my toes a little with that. It’s probably true that I need more boldness than safety, just as true about those new lands. And I’ll say that fear plays an important part in my life and maybe too much, what with all those shadows and whatnot.

So maybe instead of praying that God will keep us safe, I should pray that He will keep us on our toes. And rather than asking that His angels stand guard over us, I should pray that they will charge ahead of us into new places and new ways of seeing things. Maybe I’ve been tricked into thinking that my life is better thought of as something to be endured rather than made better, as if my purpose in being here is to comfort myself before I comfort others.

Maybe.

But maybe praying for safety is important, too. It reminds me that despite what everyone in my family may believe, I’m small. Just a tiny speck in a big world, one that oftentimes is much more scary than it is beautiful. And one who often needs a great deal of help.

Perhaps if I had the faith of the preacher I heard the other day, I wouldn’t need to ask for so much safety. Perhaps if I had his view of the world, I would see no reason to fear anything. I would see the battle as already won and the last sentence already written, one with an exclamation point rather than a period.

I hope to have that sort of faith one day. For now, I don’t. For now, I look at this world and see more shadows than light and more of what could go wrong than what has already gone right.

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A favorite saying of my mother: “You only go ’round this life once.”

Drilled into my head since I was a boy. It was a warning, though one I never truly heeded because it was only partially understood. “You only go ’round this life once” was sort of like my father’s “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” Catchy, but vague.

I’m going to be thirty-nine this summer, which is just close enough to forty to get me worrying. Not that I fret too much about the grinding of the wheels of time. Forty doesn’t mean as much as it used to. In fact, I’ve read that forty is the new thirty. That’s supposed to make me feel better, I suppose. And it does. But still…

It’s fair to say that forty can be considered a good halfway point in most people’s lives. That’s about the point where a lot of us look back over our shoulders and realize there’s a whole lot behind us, then look ahead and swear we can see a speck of something on the horizon. And though death’s great sting isn’t as great as I once thought it to be, I still feel like there’s a lot left for me to do.

And lately I’ve come to realize the gravity of the fact I only go ’round this life once. Time, now, is the issue. Much more now than it’s ever been.

But it’s not just the time I have left to do things I’ve always wanted to do, it’s the time I have left to fix the things I’ve broken. I’ve broken a lot of things in my life. Done things I shouldn’t, said things I shouldn’t. I look back on a lot of my past not in reverie, but in regret. So much so that I now find myself at this magical midpoint thinking a do-over of my first forty years would be nice.

I think about all the time I’ve wasted. Not just wasted by watching television or daydreaming on the front porch, but wasted by worry and fear. Often I realize I have lived vast parcels of my life in reverse and upside down—the things that really should have bothered me never did, and the things that really bothered me were things that didn’t shouldn’t have bothered me at all.

I still act like this. A lot.

But now I’m beginning to realize I shouldn’t, that life is too short and too precious to be mindful of tiny irritations and bothersome fears. The first half of one’s life is viewed through the lens of ourselves—our needs, our wants, our desires. The second half is viewed through the lens of eternity. That’s when we begin to see that as big as this world can seem, it’s really the smallest thing we will ever experience.

I wish I could have figured all of this out earlier. Time and experience have a way of teaching us what we’ve always ignored, though. I spend a lot of my day with people who say if there was a God, He would do something about all of the pain in the world. I tell them I stumble over that sometimes too, but that I also understand if it weren’t for the pains in my own life, I wouldn’t know anything.

That part, at least, I’ve gotten right.

But there is much I haven’t.

It seems a bit pessimistic to be looking ahead at my coming years with the express purpose not to screw them up as badly as I managed the previous ones. That’s what I’m going to do, though. And I’m going to try and love more and worry less. I’m going to try to have faith instead of fear. And I’m going to make the attempt to smile as much in the pain as in the happiness.

Because my mother was right, you only go ’round this life once.

But if you do it right, once is all you’ll need.

Life is a gift to be treasured.

***

This post is part of the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival: Treasure hosted by my friend Peter Pollock. For most posts about Treasure, please visit him at PeterPollock.com

photo by Aaron Jarrad

The story in the newspaper was accompanied by a photo of the street on which she was last seen. It was that eerie time just after the earthquake and before the wave hit. Taylor was riding her bicycle home from an elementary school in the city of Ishinoma-ki.

Use your imagination, and you will see houses and storefronts and perhaps children playing on the street corners. You will see that strange combination of resistance and joy that defines human life everywhere, that sort that makes you feel melancholy but happy to be alive.

That’s not the picture the photograph displays, however. All you see is death and destruction.

Though I do my best not to, all I can think of is her last thoughts as that wall of water came rushing toward her. I like to think it was fast. I like to think it was over before she knew it was upon her and that she didn’t suffer.

Derek Kannemeyer is a French and English teacher at St. Catherine’s, the school which Taylor once attended. In the article, he described his former student’s philosophy of life this way:

“You’ve got to go out in the world and live.”

This is the first time I’ve written about the events in Japan. I’ve wanted to ever since it happened, but I just…couldn’t. There are a great many things in this world meant to be written about by better writers than I, and what happened in Japan is one of those things. It raises questions in me about the things I believe and why I believe them. I’ve done my fair share of questioning God and shaking my fist at Him.

You should know better, I tell Him. Why didn’t You do something?

People smarter than me have been asking that question for a very, very long time. I suppose they always will.

Me, I have no answers. There is a lot in Christianity that must be accepted on faith. It is a rock you can break yourself against, that can tear you to pieces, unless you realize there are answers only God can know and you never will.

I still struggle with that.

But today I am thinking of Taylor Lane Anderson, whose life was cut short by shaking earth and raging ocean, but who still chased and managed to grab hold of her dreams. Her death was a sad tragedy, but knowing she died doing what she loved somehow takes a bit of the sting away. In the end, death that comes out of fulfilling our purpose is something to which we should all aspire.

I still question God. I doubt neither His existence nor His love, but I do His ways. They are higher than my ways, Isaiah said, as His thoughts are higher than my thoughts. I believe that. But believing that also brings a mixture of calm and fear, and I don’t believe I’m the only one to feel such things.

It is a scary time to be alive. There just seems to be so much going on—so much bad. There are days when I feel as though a black cloud hangs over this world, rumbling and swirling and ready to dump catastrophe upon us all. It’s easy to wake up in the morning and wonder, “What’s next?”

I’m sure I’ll wonder what’s next again, sure I’ll look up hoping to see the light and instead see that black, swirling cloud. When I do, I’m going to remember Taylor Lane Anderson. I’m going to remember the way she lived her life.

Because no matter what happens, no matter what fear entangles us, we’ve got to go out in the world and live.

Not only survive. Not just get by.

Live.

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I just typed the final period of the final draft of what will hopefully be my third book. Always an ambivalent experience. You’re glad the story is done, but at the same time it’s hard to let the story go. Even now, my thoughts are away from this sheet of paper and on my characters. I wonder what they’d do next and if they all managed to carry on. The answer to the former is that I have no idea. The answer to the second? Yes.

I figure that between drafts of books, journal entries, and blog posts, I’ve written about a million words in the last ten years. That’s a lot. And I have proof, too—the trunk beside my desk at home is full of notebooks and papers, as are the bottom two rows of my bookshelves. Not to mention files upon files on my computer. You would think that considering such bountiful evidence, I would know a thing or two about writing.

I don’t.

It’s a sickness to believe otherwise, at least in my case. Each time I feel as though I’m coming down with a case of I-could-do-a-whole-book-about-writing, I remedy myself by actually sitting down to write something. Always does the trick.

Because it’s difficult, the crafting of words. It’s painful and draining, and more than once I’ve asked myself why in the world I do it at all (answer: because it’s more painful and draining if I don’t).

This has been especially true with the book I just finished. Though aspects of it are similar to my first two, much of it isn’t. It was a leap of faith designed to prevent the one feeling I want to preserve every time I sit down to write.

Not hope or faith or love.

Fear.

Yes. While I’m writing, I want to be afraid.

On the surface, that shouldn’t be a problem. Deep down, writers swim in fear. They’re terrified of rejection, anxious that their work will be perceived as infantile, troubled that there are thousands of other writers out there more talented and successful. We’re a tangled mass of neuroses and obsessions.

But those aren’t the sorts of fears I’m talking about. In fact, I’d say those fears should be battered into submission so the real fear—the necessary panic—can course through me unencumbered.

Whatever our words may be to readers, to ourselves they should resemble a sledgehammer taken to the barricade we construct to keep us a safe distance from the world. Each tap of the keys or stroke of the pen should in reality be a swing of the hammer. Each word should be a tiny chunk taken from our walls. Each paragraph a brick, each page a section, until finally we are left naked with nothing between us and our audience.

That’s the fear of which I speak.

That’s the only way writing works.

There are countless definitions of what good writing looks like. For me, only one counts—good writing doesn’t show how we’re all different, but how we’re all the same. And that’s impossible unless writers are willing to be vulnerable.

Vulnerable enough to commit to the page those hidden parts within themselves which they wouldn’t even whisper to their closest friends.