In My Own Way
She was born just a couple miles from where I grew up, it turns out, though I didn’t know that until I looked it up just now. I knew, but had forgotten, that she initially enrolled at my alma mater, but left after just one semester, having failed the majority of her writing assignments, depleted all the money she’d saved, and—maybe most surprising in hindsight—been rejected by the college newspaper. Later, she enrolled at (and graduated from) a university just up the road from where I live now, worked in a department store three blocks from here, was buried in a cemetery you can see my house from, and posthumously had her childhood home (in the neighborhood where my elementary school sat but, more famously, across the street from Phil Donahue’s house) named to the National Register of Historic Places.
This isn’t really about her, though—at least it’s not about how I admired or emulated her, or how many commonalities or crossed paths we shared. It’s more what we didn’t have in common that has me thinking about her now.
· · ·
They named a street after her, too. Or part of one, because that’s what we do—with no one left to remember the past luminaries or historic significances originally memorialized with streets named for them, we feel entitled to chop up their full accolade and bequeath segments of it to the heroes of our day, with the promise that now no one will ever forget them. It’s why my address bears the name of a local founding father and turn of the century captain of industry, but I live where the part of it rebranded in honor of a Philadelphia Phillies Hall of Famer intersects with the part of the cross street renamed for a fixture of the local music scene from the ‘80s. Even so, no one here gives directions using “Mike Schmidt Parkway” or “East Mick Montgomery.” Maybe those don’t roll off the tongue the same way “Turn left on Edwin C.” does when someone wants you to take the boulevard named for Olympic track star and local boy Edwin C. Moses.
They still call Brown Street “Brown Street,” too, but if you find yourself driving the section that passes by the university she graduated from, you can’t help but notice the signs designating that short stretch as Erma Bombeck Way.
Ours isn’t the only city that names streets after its hometown darlings, of course. Any small town in the country lucky enough to have one of its own achieve some level of fame or notoriety is all too happy to remind you, lest you think nothing worthwhile ever came out of that patch of earth, that someone who is now a celebrity once breathed that same air. They rarely mention that this lauded person fled the town that produced them just as quickly as they were able to get out, but hey—proof that the soil is fertile and once grew something good, I guess. I have never been to Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, but if there’s not a sign at the city limits that reads “Home of Taylor Swift,” I’d certainly be surprised. I haven’t been to Corning, Iowa, either, but I do know for a fact they have a sign alerting you that “Heeeeere’s…” Johnny Carson’s birthplace.
And when you’re a sleepy, small town, it makes sense. Chances are, most folks there actually knew the celebrity or at least know their family, and are genuinely proud that someone from there made it big. It may also be the only thing about the town that might be of interest to outsiders so, sure, go ahead and build an entire tourist industry around Larry Bird being “The Hick from French Lick,” Indiana, or hang a plaque to tell the world that your restaurant once sold a meatball hoagie to Oprah.
When your town gets to be a certain size, though, that’s when it starts to feel a little desperate. You don’t see New York City posting signs as you exit the Lincoln Tunnel that read “Birthplace of Amanda Peet,” and Chicago rarely has to remind you that Bono once spent a night there. Part of this, of course, is a numbers game—New York would take up most of Manhattan’s acreage erecting a sign that listed all the famous people who came from there—but most of it has to do with there being far more interesting things going on in their town, such that they don’t need to brag about being the place where Lenny Kravitz went to elementary school.
· · ·
Dayton, Ohio, isn’t New York City. It’s not Corning, Iowa, either, but sometimes it needs to be reminded of that. Other cities may tell you about the famous people who are from there, but none of them seem to do it with quite the same defensiveness and something to prove as we do here. When you’re the sixth largest city in a midwestern flyover state, the inferiority complex is more or less baked in, and it’s not helped much by a national media seemingly obsessed with pigeonholing you as the place you were 25 years ago or maybe never were. Celebrity and fame are too often equated with proof that you belong, which probably at least partially explains why I have been to a parade where Gordon Jump was the Grand Marshal, why everyone says John Legend is from here even though he’s from 30 miles away, why I’ve heard people propose building statues of Martin Sheen and Rob Lowe, and why just about anyone in this town will fight you to the death if you try to claim our precious Wright brothers invented flight in North Carolina.
The cruel irony, of course, is that Dayton has so much going for it, but so few people here know it. I’m sure it’s natural for most people to look down on the place where they grew up—especially if they never left it—and to be envious of the things other places have that their town doesn’t. I’ve met plenty of New Yorkers who are sick of the crowds and stress, numerous Angelinos tired of the traffic, Northerners who’ve had it with the cold, Southerners who are over the heat, small towners dying for culture and excitement, and urban dwellers who long for a secluded cabin in Montana to get away from it all. Even Hawaiians get island fever and have filled my long, hibiscus-scented Uber rides through ridiculously picturesque scenery with their complaints about life in paradise.
For Daytonians, though, it’s more than just a “grass is always greener” phenomenon. The collective self-loathing here runs deep and is part of our indoctrination from an early age, repeated again and again by our families and peers, our local news media and industry, and even our businesses, until we not only believe it, but internalize it and allow it to become a central part of who we are. There’s a bar here that sells a bumper sticker I’ve seen on too many cars that reads “Dayton’s alright… if you’ve never been anywhere else.” I’m sure it’s supposed to be funny, but in reality, it just sums up how we’re all taught to feel about our home: We’re sure it sucks, but we can’t quite explain what sucks about it. Or what sucks less elsewhere. Or why it hasn’t yet sucked enough for us to leave it.
We’re probably the only ones who feel this way about Dayton, mind you. I mean, sure, Dayton is frequently used as a punchline by those who’ve never been here, and lazy reporters will paint us as a dying or dead Rust Belt has-been without actually investigating to find how little of that is true. But when it comes to those who’ve spent real time here, we’re the ones with the blinders on. I’ve long lost count of the visitors from larger cities who stop just short of grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me, breathlessly gasping, “You don’t know what you’ve got here!” Dazzled by arts and culture that rival huge cities, a craft brewing scene that keeps growing and somehow never hits its bubble, recreational amenities and parks and cycling everywhere you look, and any number of other amazing perks, they can’t believe we have all this, plus minimal traffic, ample parking, dirt cheap real estate, and other lifestyle benefits we take for granted but they’d kill for. There are bigger city friends of mine who will think I’m nuts to put any of this in writing, because they feel like we Daytonians are sitting on one of the best kept secrets they’ve ever seen, and they’ve warned me to tell no one about it lest the word get out and the great thing we’ve got get ruined.
All this is to say that Dayton is the kind of city where we could all be happy—or at least feel incredibly lucky and satisfied—if we could just get out of our own way. I’m not all that well-versed in what Dayton was like in the Wright brothers’ day, but if its residents were half as full of self-doubt, self-deprecation, and yeah-but-ism as everyone was when I was growing up, then it’s a wonder those boys ever got that plane off the ground. Maybe they had to go to Kittyhawk just to find some air that wasn’t too thick with its own negativity to let their dreams take flight. For a city known for inventors, Dayton sure has a way of making its people feel that their ideas can never be pursued, their hopes will never become reality, and there’s no sense in ever putting themselves out there, taking a risk, or expressing themselves in any way. In Dayton, you get craft beers and great parks and big city amenities with small town charm, but you also get a voice in your head with a discouraging inner monologue:
Stay quiet. Stay humble. Stay in your place. Who are you to think you have anything to contribute? Why would anyone want to hear from you? You’re not John Legend or Martin Sheen. You’re not even Gordon Jump.
· · ·
Gordon Jump, it seems, was not the only Dayton product to serve as a parade Grand Marshal. Ten years before he was waving from a convertible in the Fourth of July parade for the suburb Erma Bombeck and I called home, Bombeck was Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade in Pasadena. She had left Dayton by then, too, although not because she hated it here and couldn’t wait to get out or felt suffocated by its “you’ll never amount to anything” and “stay quiet and don’t contribute” attitudes. Erma had something to contribute—a lot of something to contribute, if the hundreds of columns, radio show appearances, lectures, and books she churned out from that little house in the Dayton suburbs before moving to Arizona were any indication. She had commitment and work ethic, too. In a 1991 interview with the University of Dayton, she explained:
Discipline is what I do best. I can’t imagine any writer saying to you, ‘I just write when I feel like it.’ That’s a luxury, and that’s stupid. The same for writer’s block. If you’re a professional writer, you write. You don’t sit there and wait for sweet inspiration to tap you on the shoulder and say now’s the time. We meet deadlines. I write for newspapers, and newspapers don’t wait for anyone. You write whether you feel like it, you write whether you’ve got an idea, you write whether it’s Pulitzer Prize material. You just do it, that’s it. Discipline is what we’re all about. If you don’t have discipline, you’re not a writer.
Erma Bombeck was from Dayton, and a lot of things about her were “very Dayton.” Her columns and best-selling books were mostly filled with her humorous takes on the life of a midwestern suburban housewife, and her home town no doubt provided her an endless supply of material. What it somehow didn’t provide her was that destructive inner monologue that has given so many of us an endless supply of self-doubt and held us back from putting ourselves out there and taking a risk. In that same interview, Erma noted:
I have a son who’s a writer in Los Angeles for made-for-television movies. He had a job in an advertising agency, and I told him, ‘If you’re serious, then you have to put it on the line. You have to take a risk. You have to say, I am a writer and quit the job.’ There comes a time when you have to stop talking and start doing.
One of her bestsellers was a book titled The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank. It’s touted as an expose that tells the truth about the suburbs—the premise being that the lifestyle so many view as ideal is full of its own flaws when you peel back the curtain. Daytonians love their suburbs, but they could take a lesson from the title anyway and stop assuming everyone and everywhere else is so much better than they are. They could also stop talking about the things they wish Dayton—and themselves—would be, and start doing something about it.
· · ·
At this point, I should probably confess that I haven’t been entirely straight with you. I’ve painted a picture of my hometown as being only full of negativity and self-sabotage. A place where no one has any pride in their city, and everyone thinks less of where they’re from than the world outside thinks of it. To be fair, I may have been purposely tilting the scale for effect, but I haven’t been embellishing—those attitudes and inferiority complexes really do exist here and really are as strong and deeply ingrained as I’ve portrayed them to be. So, think of it less as a lie and more as a sin of omission. The part I left out is that this homegrown self-hatred is largely found in two places. One is the past—probably the 1980s, likely the ‘90s, and definitely the early 2000s, before Dayton began its recent, post-recession resurgence. There were times when things here were nearly as bleak as everyone liked to claim they were.
The other place is present day, in essentially every part of the metro area that is not the city center itself. Even now, with all the growth and freshness and activity here, Dayton’s suburbs and other outlying areas are mostly made up of people who never venture into the city proper despite living incredibly short distances from it, and whose negative opinions about Dayton and its downtown are based upon the last time they spent time here, which in many cases may actually be decades ago. When others from the city at large learn that I live downtown, they often have no qualms about responding with “Why?!” or with any number of disparaging and ill-informed opinions about the area I’ve chosen to make my home.
As annoying as those interactions may be, I get it. I lived both of those realities—I grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when things were less exciting and positive for Dayton, and I grew up in the suburbs. We were a 20-minute, traffic-free drive from the city, but the only times we ever visited were school field trips to force culture on kids or a rare bus ride with Grandma to have lunch in a tall(ish) building and shop in the big, non-mall department store. We had no idea what our city had to offer and, worse, were frequently told that the answer to that question was “a whole lot of nothing.” So, while I would hope I wouldn’t have uttered it directly in the face of someone who told me they lived downtown back then, I can imagine that I might have been quietly wondering “Why?!”
I know why now. And so do many others. And, while I could list dozens of things that make this city great, that’s not the point I’m trying to make here. The point is that there is actually a downtown community, growing larger all the time, made up of people who buck the stereotype of Daytonians being down on their city, and buck it hard. Downtowners these days aren’t surprised when visitors from larger cities heap praise on our town. They know what we have here. They know our strengths and what makes us unique. They love Dayton, and they fiercely defend it, although they also won’t waste much time trying to convince you—there’s an attitude of “If you don’t get it, that’s your loss.” That one bar is still selling the “Dayton’s alright…” bumper sticker, but it’s surrounded by shops unironically selling shirts with messages of Dayton pride on them and hundreds of people unironically wearing them—something I couldn’t have imagined when I was growing up and everyone answered “Where are you from?” with the name of their suburb so they didn’t have to say “Dayton.”
The visitors from big cities aren’t wrong when they drool over our cheap real estate and cost of living, the city’s walkability, the abundance of independent breweries or arts or recreational amenities, or any of the other obvious, tangible benefits they think we’re lucky to have here. Those who love living here recognize all that—in many cases, it’s likely what drew them here. But the real perk—the real reason for pride in our town—is something much harder to quantify. There’s a character to this city. A personality, or a feeling, or an attitude and way of living that permeates everything and everyone here and makes us different. The only way I know how to describe it doesn’t do much to capture its essence, but it’s true just the same:
Dayton is a town that does things in its own way.
We do things differently here, and we’re proud of it. Everyone here may be doing things in their own way differently than the next Daytonian does, but somehow there’s a common thread linking all those ways together and making a sameness out of the differences. We’re not like other cities—and where that has so often been a source of self-loathing, isolation, and embarrassment, it’s now also a source of confidence, belonging, and pride. It’s not a feeling you can easily sum up in a single sentence or a T-shirt slogan, though many have tried. Local shops sell shirts emblazoned with phrases like, “It’s okay, I’m from Dayton,” or “Dayton as fuck,” or “Dayton ‘til I die.” The Dayton-based band, Brainiac, may have hit it most squarely on the head with its “Fuck y’all. We’re from Dayton” shirts. Basically, the attitude here is something like:
Like it or don’t like it. Get it or don’t. We really don’t care either way. We like it here, but you don’t have to. Dayton’s not for everybody.
Where the intangible becomes tangible is when you see people capitalizing on their uniqueness to create something amazing. More and more folks here have turned doing something in their own way into incredible successes—the realization of dreams, the creation of art, financial success and entrepreneurship, volunteerism and community service, national attention and recognition, and other achievements. Almost all of them, when asked to share their story, will talk about having wanted for years to do something great, but not being willing to put themselves out there until someone or something helped them believe that the way they were different from everyone else was a strength, not a drawback. Overcoming their own self-sabotage was the biggest hurdle between where they were and where they are now. It’s amazing what you can talk yourself out of.
Dayton so often will try to whisper in your ear until you doubt you have anything to contribute. But it will also teach you an important lesson if you listen to what it’s shouting through the whispers: Sometimes the best way to get out of your own way is to ignore the way most people do things, or what worked for someone else, or what’s expected of you.
Sometimes the best way to get out of your own way is to do things in your own way.
· · ·
In the year 2000, the Bombeck family gifted some of Erma’s papers to her alma mater. In commemoration of the occasion, The University of Dayton created the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop, a gathering of writers and aspiring writers with well-known keynote speakers and topical sessions on writing, publishing your writing, marketing your writing, and other writing-related activities. The workshop was intended to be a one-off event, but it was so popular that the university continued to offer it on a biennial basis. It sounds a little quaint, maybe, but it quickly became a big deal, drawing hundreds of writers from all over the world. Erma’s popularity (likely combined with the university’s money) drew some pretty big names to our little town to serve as featured speakers. Granted, the year I had tickets to the keynote, the speaker was Don Novello, best known for playing Father Guido Sarducci on SNL, who gave a very odd and not terribly funny speech accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation of random, seemingly unrelated photos but, whatever—they can’t all be winners. I’m sure attendees were suitably wowed by Garrison Keillor, Art Buchwald, Bart Simpson’s voice in the person of Nancy Cartwright, and the aforementioned Phil Donahue in other years’ keynotes.
Father Guido’s evening of stream of consciousness commentary and non-sequitur slide show was worth every penny, though, mostly because I hadn’t paid for my tickets. The university had given a handful of free admissions to people who were involved as partners of the workshop that year and, as it turns out, I was one. My employer at the time had gotten involved with the Writers’ Workshop by creating a companion Erma Bombeck Writing Competition that solicited entries from all over the globe in two categories, “Humor” and “Human Interest.” (Evidently, they thought humans weren’t interested in humor and, to be fair, I have met a lot of humans who seemingly are not.) It became my role to administer the contest, not because anyone thought I was a talented writer or a natural fit, but because I was often the guy tapped to take on random projects that didn’t necessarily fall under anyone else’s job description, and this was decidedly one of those.
For several years, I developed and sent out the call for entries, managed the website that collected them, answered oddball questions about the contest, recruited judges, served as a judge myself, contacted winners, and attended awards dinners at the conference. It was a mostly-fun part of my job, and it made for some very memorable situations, not the least of which being the day I called former Texas governor Ann Richards at home to inquire about her being a celebrity judge—it was, I believe, the only time someone called me back at work and said, “I’m so sorry, honey, I just got off the phone with Bill Clinton. Otherwise, I woulda’ picked up when y’called.”
Reading the entries was always a source of entertainment, too. We would typically get more than a thousand of them, and there were no prerequisites or required proof that you were actually “a writer,” so the level of talent—and, at times, mental stability—varied wildly. I used to half-joke that I could write an essay under a pseudonym, submit it, and be almost guaranteed of winning the competition. This wasn’t because I had an inflated ego or fancied myself a particularly good writer; it was because after several years of involvement with the contest, I had picked up on the patterns in the essays the judges tended to choose as winners, and knew what they were looking for. It was clear—and a bit disappointing to me—that, despite there being no mandate on writing style or subject matter, the more you tried to impersonate Erma, the more likely you were to win. Your essay on politics or sex or race relations might be funnier, more interesting, or better written than others chosen over yours, but churn out some folksy, light chuckler about the trials and tribulations of ironing shirts or parenting a precocious toddler, and you were a shoo-in.
No disrespect meant to the actual winners, of course, and certainly none to Erma herself—her writing style and topics may not have exactly been my particular taste, but it was clear she had talent. And, given the time period she was writing in, the roles available to women at the time, and her suburban midwestern beginnings, finding humor in the everyday life of a housewife not only made sense for her—it was even considered edgy in its day. Edgier still was Erma’s involvement and advocacy for the Equal Rights Amendment, which drew backlash from conservatives and had stores pulling her books from their shelves. She was a fighter for the things she believed in—a fact probably belied somewhat by being known for writing about ostensibly innocuous things like laundry and carpools, no matter how subversive and biting her wit could be on those subjects. Biographer Lynn Hutner Colwell wrote about Bombeck:
Erma believed in true equality, that no matter how you spend your life, you deserve recognition and acceptance and that the contribution you make to society by caring for your family should be considered equal to that made by anyone working at a job with regulated hours and pay.
Erma eventually got the recognition and acceptance she deserved, not only for caring for her family, but for her talents with writing. Her column would be featured in more than 900 newspapers, she wrote several best-selling books, she wrote for magazines and television, garnered numerous awards, had a regular appearance on Good Morning America, became fairly wealthy, and was more than famous enough for Dayton, Ohio, to name part of a street in her honor. Difficult though it may be to imagine now, however, her recognition and acceptance were not immediate. Erma had been writing humorous newspaper columns as far back as junior high school in 1940. Her column in high school was more serious, but she managed to work humor into it, too, whenever she could. She also worked for the Dayton Herald at that time, even interviewing Shirley Temple during her visit to Dayton. After high school, she took small journalism assignments—obituary writing, typing, stenography—to earn enough tuition money to enroll at my alma mater, Ohio University. Given how much of her life and effort she’d put into writing for newspapers to that point—and the fact that she had quit a newspaper job to pursue her college degree—I imagine it was fairly devastating when a guidance counselor at the university strongly advised her to get out of journalism and become a secretary, telling her she had “absolutely no hope, whatsoever” of becoming a writer.
I didn’t know Erma Bombeck. And, honestly, it’s not like I’ve done nearly enough research on her to pretend I know what she was like, either. But the more I learn about her, the more I’m starting to feel like she had one important quality that was probably more responsible for her success than her writing ability or sense of humor or storytelling skills ever could have been:
Erma didn’t get in her own way. She knew she wanted to write, and so she did, regardless of the obstacles and without a voice in her head giving her a million reasons not to bother.
Plenty of other people tried to get in Erma’s way, though. The mentality in the 1940s and ‘50s certainly wasn’t accepting of women having careers of their choosing, let alone being writers, being funny, or exposing the downsides of being a suburban housewife. Even as fortunate as she was to have written regular columns for newspapers in those days, she just as often was given such less writerly jobs as being a typist or a “copy girl.” She worked two jobs to save enough money for college, only to have that college tell her to give up on journalism and be a secretary. But through it all, Erma remained determined—she wanted to write, and she wanted to prove that she could. She kept at it, worked hard, and enrolled at the University of Dayton, where a professor who knew she wanted to be a writer encouraged her to draft something for the university magazine. Bombeck went home, wrote a piece, and slid it under the professor’s door, waiting nervously for his critique—despite her internal drive and her desire to make writing her life, the one thing she’d been missing was some external affirmation from someone whose opinion she respected.
That professor later saw Erma outside the cafeteria and spoke just three words to her, but she has repeatedly said that those words sustained her for the rest of her life. His words, in fact, would later become the tagline and motto of the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop. Today, you can buy mugs and tote bags and a wide assortment of other Erma merchandise, all branded with the line she recalled in so many interviews:
One day, he said to me, “You can write.”
· · ·
I said before that this wasn’t about her. I’ve never been a particular fan of—or, frankly, had strong opinions one way or the other about—Erma Bombeck’s writing. Come to think of it, I haven’t even read all that much of it. I don’t read anything other than pure coincidence into how much of her life was lived in or near the same places I’ve lived mine, or take any particular pride in her being from my home town. I’ve never measured my life by hers or found myself wanting to follow in her footsteps, and my life will not be any less complete if I’m never the Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade. Well, alright—maybe a little less complete.
Erma popped back into my mind at random recently, after a friend had bugged-slash-encouraged me for the thousandth time to start doing something more tangible with my sort of ethereal and ephemeral bits of writing. This wasn’t the first time and she wasn’t the first person to hound me about this—she probably wasn’t the hundred-and-first person. Reminding me of the conversations we’d had many times before, she said something along the lines of “Please start working on a website or a blog or something, will you?!” And, for once, instead of just giving her the usual brush-off and “yeah, I really should” platitudes and going back to mostly ignoring the advice, I started thinking about why I hadn’t done it yet—like, specifically, why hadn’t I done it?
I hadn’t thought about the Erma Bombeck Writing Competition or the Writers’ Workshop in a long time, but out of nowhere I was picturing the logo and the merchandise and the website all branded with the words “You can write” and hearing Erma’s voice in interviews, telling the world that those three simple words were all she needed to put herself out there and make a life doing what she loved and believed she was good at. I found myself jealous of Erma—not of her talent or her fame or even her success or happiness doing what she wanted to do—I was jealous that one small affirmation and encouragement was all she needed to make it happen. Erma had such conviction and dedication and willingness to put in the work, combined with such a lack of self-sabotage, that when one trusted person told her she was good at something it sustained her for the rest of her life, through bestsellers and syndicated columns and a life proving that she could, in fact, write.
Thinking about it not only made me jealous; it made me a little ashamed, or whatever the feeling is when you’re thinking, “What the hell is my problem?” Over the years, I’ve had dozens of folks provide the kind of affirmation Erma Bombeck got from her professor. Countless people have told me that I can write or that I have talent and need to do something with that talent. A handful of those people are actual writers or artists or others with the expertise and experience to know what they’re talking about. Others are well meaning friends who say things like, “You should write for The Daily Show,” without any understanding of how difficult those jobs are to get and how underqualified I’d be, but their encouragement is no less appreciated. Unlike Erma, unfortunately, none of that external praise and motivation has yet been enough to make me start anything, let alone to sustain me for a lifetime.
For Erma, the obstacles she faced and the single affirmation she needed came from outside. For me, the call is coming from inside the house. I’m not up against 1950s sexism and societal expectations or myopic college guidance counselors with bad advice. I’m up against something far more nefarious: my own mind and its ability to talk myself out of anything. I have always been a bit risk avoidant, at least when it comes to things that I perceive as having potential for massive negative impact or pain—changing jobs, dating, skydiving, that kind of thing—and will amplify all the possible negative outcomes in my head until they drown out the potential upsides. And, while I’ve been willing to post what I consider sort of “throwaway” writing or photos or other art on social media where I feel like the stakes are low, there has always been that self-sabotaging voice in my head giving me a million reasons not to take people’s advice and make something more concrete of it all:
You’re not good enough. Your work isn’t polished or edited well. If you make something more “official,” people will think you take yourself too seriously. Not many people understand or agree with what you have to say—not everyone “gets” you. Putting it out there will come with expectations—it will end up feeling like “work’ and take all the fun out of it.
Stay quiet. Stay humble. Stay in your place. Who are you to think you have anything to contribute?
There is also the fact that I don’t write the way Erma did. Frankly, I don’t write the way you need to write if you want to be a writer. I don’t make myself sit down and write when I don’t feel like it. I write when the inspiration hits, when I have an idea, when I have something to say or think I can make someone laugh. I have always done it that way, and the fear of killing my creativity by turning it into a chore is real.
Erma Bombeck would say this means I’m not a writer. In fact, I believe the word she used for it was “stupid.” She may or may not be right on the latter sentiment, but she almost certainly is on the former. Erma may have seen it as laziness or a luxury—I see it as the way I work. I’m at my creative best when I get a random, weird thought, or when someone asks me to write a poem about David Hasselhoff and I think, “I’ll take that challenge.” I spit something out, and it’s done—I rarely go back and edit things much, because the moment has passed and any time I spend trying to make the thing better feels subject to the Law of Diminishing Returns. More to the point, I do most of my editing on the fly, such that my first draft is usually my last. In middle school, we’d be required to turn in all of our drafts stapled to the final draft, and I would fake it, writing a final draft first and then going back and creating counterfeit first drafts with intentionally placed misspellings or cutting room floor words and sentences that had never actually been there in the first place, just so I could cross them out and give the teacher what she wanted. That doesn’t mean my first drafts are perfect—far from it. It just means that they’re usually about as good as they’re going to get, because I’m on to the next thing and unlikely to keep going back and tinkering with them, chasing a perfection that will never exist.
That’s a weird thing for a perfectionist to say, and I definitely fit that description. I’ve spent most of my life trying to come to terms with the fact that sometimes “good enough” is good enough. I’ve never liked to attach my name to something that’s less than it could be, and that probably has a lot to do with why I’ve ignored all the encouragement from friends and strangers and never made something tangible, lasting, and public out of my writing or other creative endeavors. Anything I share with people typically comes with the caveat, “It’s not my best work,” so any talk of collecting all these unfinished, sub-par efforts and making them permanently accessible has, to this point, been just that—talk. But, as Erma told her son, “There comes a time when you have to have to stop talking and start doing.”
I don’t necessarily credit Dayton with instilling negativity and self-sabotage into the core of who I am. More likely, it’s heredity or brain chemistry or just part of my curmudgeonly charm. But it has always been there, making me by my own biggest obstacle to happiness, satisfaction, or being the fullest and truest version of who I am. Fortunately, like Dayton, while much of my brain is populated with an inferiority complex, there is a small but growing section at the core that has a bit of a superiority complex, and knows that doing things differently than everyone else is a strength, not a drawback. Sitting at a bar recently, I made some offhanded joke that had friends and the bartender cracking up, but a woman nearby commented, “Uh, okay. I don’t get it.” At some points in my life, that might’ve made me feel small or like I needed to win her over in some way, or like a guidance counselor was telling me to give up on my dreams. But that night, I didn’t even turn to look this person, let alone worry about what she thought. Instead, I said, “That’s alright. I’m not for everybody.”
I’m not Erma Bombeck. I’m not Martin Sheen or Mike Schmidt or Orville Wright or John Legend or even Gordon Jump. I’m not Corning, Iowa, either, but sometimes I need remind myself of that. I’m not a writer, but enough people have told me those three little words that maybe it’s time I believed them myself, even if I don’t own the mug or the tote bag.
I can write.
I’m going to attempt to take my friend’s advice and create a website or a blog or something where all the weird products of my creative side can live. I’m not looking to make a life out of it or be syndicated in 900 newspapers or, god forbid, contribute segments to Good Morning, America—fame is a septic tank I’ve always known was lurking beneath the greener grass. I’m also not looking to do it the way people may expect me to, with dedication and drive, or with writing tailored to appeal to the masses, or with pieces that have been revised and edited and massaged to perfection.
The best way for me to get out of my own way
is to do things in my own way.