Old wounds were on the schedule.
This week my Morning Work playbook said dig up the teacher who told you your work wasn’t good enough. Parents who said that’s nice in a voice that meant that’s nothing. The editor who handed my photos back without looking.
I have those. I was a photojournalist overseas in my late teens and early 20s. Came back to America, got into tech, became a strategist. More than a few people told me I wasn’t creative. Someone told me I was too old. I was 25.
I bet you hear the same voice at 55. Or 85. The Accuser does not age.
Then the week happened.
A well-intentioned reader wrote back this week:
I enjoy your work. But I honestly don’t understand the point of these stories.
I read it and kept writing. Because stories unlock things that fact-drenched articles can’t. I know what I’m building. The old me would have flinched
Anger
Cameron says Week 3 is about recovering a sense of power. And in her framework the door to power is anger.
Most of you have been trained out of it. Told anger is unproductive. Unchristian. Ungrateful. Told to give it to God, which sometimes means bury it in the yard and pretend you forgot where.
Cameron says anger is information. It tells you where your boundaries were crossed. It gives you the energy to get up off the floor.
Jesus did not suppress his anger in the temple. He braided a whip. He overturned the tables of the men selling access to the Father. He cleared the building before he taught a single word.
The anger came first.
Hometown
The Carpenter walked into his hometown synagogue at 30. He’d been gone for years. He opened the scroll of Isaiah. Read the passage about the Spirit of the Lord anointing a man to bring good news to the poor. Rolled it up. Sat down.
He said: today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.
The hometown said: Is this not the carpenter’s son?
They were offended. That is the word in the text. Because they had a picture of who he was supposed to be and the picture did not include what he was becoming.
They tried to throw him off a cliff.
He walked through the middle of them and left.
Readers
I lost half my subscribers this year The readers who found me through political exposés wanted more political exposés. When I started writing about the Father, about Moses, about a boy building a coffin in a Galilean workshop, some of them asked the hometown question.
Why are you writing this?
Because I am making the work I wish I’d had as a kid.
I am writing for the ones with ears to hear. I am writing for my children, so they have access to the things I was never taught. So there is something on the shelf when I’m not here to tell them in person.
A reader named Amy wrote last week that God told her 19 years ago she would be a writer. Her pages stayed blank. She is 57 years old and five months pregnant with a miracle. Now she is writing to her son. A writer waking up.
Writer just means picking up the pen. Even if the reader is your unborn son.
19 years of the Accuser saying not yet. Amy decided to pick up the pen.
The Lineage
Bob Dylan spent five years as the voice of folk music. Woody Guthrie’s heir.
Then he plugged in a Stratocaster and brought a drummer.
The real crowd booed. Someone yelled Judas.
Dylan told the band to play it f*cking loud. And they did.
Kubrick made 2001 after Dr. Strangelove. Most of the audience walked out of the first screening. Lewis wrote sci-fi in the 40s and the literary establishment told him he’d lost his mind. Milton made Lucifer the most compelling character in Paradise Lost and his peers never quite forgave him.
The Accuser was in the back of each of those rooms.
Same sentence every single time.
Stay who you were.
This Week: The Letter in Defense
Take 30 minutes. Sit with your notebook. Write a letter defending your artist.
Not for anyone else. Write it to whoever told you, by word or by silence, that you could not or should not become who you are becoming.
You don’t have to name them. Most of them love you.
They just have a picture that won’t move.
Write it anyway. Put it on the paper. The paper can hold it.
What’s the thing someone tried to keep you small about?
You don’t have to answer here in the comments. But if you do, someone scrolling through will see their own sentence and stop pretending they don’t carry one too.
I’m going to be hiking and biking with my kids this weekend. They’re at an age where all they want is to be with me and I know how fast that goes.
Enjoy your weekend. Keep looking up. Keep writing.
I love you.
<3 EKO
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I love you.
The pleasure and fulfillment you feel internally comes through your writing, EKO. The vibes are there...don't stop.
The spouse that never stops working and is always productive that quietly asks me Why are you making that? Are you going to sell it? How much time have you spent on it? His well-meaning words make my soul feel thin.