WHO AM I?

Gentle Readers (I understand there actually are some!),

My husband Jerry and I led a Life Group in our home (twice) last summer. It was called Letting God Speak Truth to the Lies You Believe.

First each person had to identify the lies in hi/r life. We gave each one a piece of paper with "Who Am I?" at the top and then a column of numbers, 1-25. They were to list as many ways of describing themselves as they could and at the end share them aloud if they wished. Some started writing immediately. Others were stumped at for awhile.

Some described themselves physically: I am a redhead. I am handsome. I am left-handed. Others described themselves in terms of their relationships or ethnicity: I am a wife. I am Latino. I am a follower of Christ. Others in terms of their job or hobby: I work at a supermarket. I am an artist.

When the members of our Life Group had filled all 25 slots, we handed them a new sheet. At the top was, Who Am I, Really? or, as I tried to explain to the ones who looked blank, "Who Am I, Feely?

Now they dredged a little deeper. "I'm lonely. I'm angry. I'm a fraud." Where some had written, "I'm a wife/mother," they now wrote things like, "I'm a doormat" or "I'm a d--- good mother!"

A woman who was one of seven children once told me, "Three of us were bad and four were good. I was one of the bad ones." A relative who spent many years in prison told me, "I am a screw-up." I'll bet he had internalized that before he "proved" it by dealing cocaine. Some of these things become self-fulfilling prophecies. A parent pulls a size-2 T-shirt over a child's head reading, "Here comes TROUBLE!" You want to program a child to be incorrigible? Just have everyone who encounters him laugh and call him "Trouble." That'll do it.

Until a few years ago, I would have had no problem filling out a form like that. Number 1 would have been, "I am a writer." Hands down, no question, case closed. Oh, yes, and after that I would have remembered random things like "I am a Christian, I am married, I am a mother. I am a survivor. I am compassionate. I am  transparent. I am stubborn, I am sometimes too controlling, etc."

But writer was #1. That's who I was before I was anything else.

I was born into a family of writers. My great-grandmother was a syndicated columnist. My grandparents wrote books, my parents wrote books, my two brothers wrote books. As an adult I found I had a niece and nephew we hadn't known about--and sure enough, they'd each written a book!

I started a diary when I was six or seven, in a tiny blue ringed notebook. We traveled out west in our Woody and I wrote things like--well, let me quote verbatim, spelling included: "We went to Winkies Brithday (winkie is an ElePhant] he had a Brithday cake for himself It had Oats and bran and Graham Cracks and one carrot." (Then I gave the recipe.) "he is six But They Put One Carrot Candle on because he had been at the Zoo One year. . . everyone got some cake allmost everyone got some I got Two pieces because the man That was Selling The Cake yelled Out get in The back of the line quick before Its all gone so I got in The Back of The line Once more and got One more piese I got at the End of The line Once more But This Time It was all gone. . ." Pretty hot stuff, huh?

When I was ten, my parents had me keep a journal as part of (what my present husband calls) my boat-schooling. I was programmed to be a writer. They didn't agree on some other things but both parents convinced me I would be a writer. And not just a writer. A great writer. I believed it.

Fortunately I wanted to be a writer. When I became a teen, Dad joked about how I would carry my fountain pen and a bottle of ink with me on dates. He said when a man proposed, I'd whip my pen out of my purse and tell him, "Could you say that again? I want to take down the exact words."

Dad and Mom (we called them Skipper and Mum) had a literary agent. They typed up parts of my journal, written when I was 11, about sailing from Hawaii through the South Seas to New Zealand, sent it off to their agent and when I was 14, voila, a box arrived full of colorful hard-backed copies of Jessica's Journal.

I was just taking one of the books out of the box with awe when my dad teased, "So, when are you going to write your second book? You don't want to sit around on your laurels, you know!" My dad was god to me. I took everything he said literally. I believed him when we lived in Japan and ate swordfish every week for three years and he promised when we'd eaten the whole fish we'd get the sword.

So I was pretty anxious until my second book was finally published. It was in Japanese translation so I couldn't read it, they'd titled it Jessica's Journal like my first one instead of To Russia with Love and they'd printed a picture of my mother in the front instead of me. But it was published, that's what mattered. I was 18.

I edited my college yearbook. Over the years, I had 700 or 800 articles published in magazines and major newspapers. I wrote a lot of books that weren't published before my third one came out. It was the biography of a 14-year old who had survived a late-term abortion.

If you had asked me, "Who are you?" there was no weighing of alternatives. I was a writer. Oh, yeah, I was a wife, I was the mother of two--but above all I was a writer. I had become a Christian at the age of 19 but that wasn't my primary identity. Not unless I stopped to think about it.

Then God took my writing away. It was the strangest thing. I would have ideas teeming in my mind and I would go eagerly to my journal or my computer--and nothing would happen. My mind would go blank. I'd sit for hours like that, waiting, paralyzed. I couldn't write. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. And the hardest part of the grief I felt about not being able to write was that I couldn't write about it!

I asked my husband (my first husband, Rick), "So this is what it's like to be a regular person? Something happens and you don't write it down?"

But who was I if I wasn't a writer? What value, what worth did I have if I wasn't publishing things periodically? And my journal was my best friend. I confided everything to it. Who would I talk to? It was my thumb and my blanket, my security, my comfort. It was me.

To be continued! (There is a point coming up, with take-away value for you, gentle reader, if you haven't wandered away yawning already.)