#19. Penny
Annie Dillard’s childhood compulsion to hide pennies initiated a compulsion of my own. I can’t help but find pennies, seemingly everywhere now. They appear in empty parking lot spaces and on the floor of a dirty gas station bathrooms and on restaurant tables. I have been compelled not only to see them but to pick them up. I store them in a cleaned out candle tin in my cubicle at work.
Each time I see a penny cast down and passed up, by who knows how many people, my neurons zap me back to Dillard’s page 17. Will I be a person who gets excited by a mere penny? I so often stray into anxious blindness unable to see the pennies of the mundane.
That’s why I walked all of yesterday with a penny in my shoe. I needed a reminder, a moment by moment prodding, to look out for the sweet pennies cast broadside into my life. There are pennies to find at all times, even in this year.
Last Fall, I was projecting a particular type of year. I certainly did not anticipate a pandemic or a national awakening to racial injustices. Like many of us, I am experiencing fear, grief, heaviness, hope, exhaustion, rage, and rest. Back in December, I committed to 400 “penny” New Year resolutions. With a nod to the repeating 20s of this year, I mapped out 20 different activities to perform 20 different times. Some activities are ones that already compel me towards living creatively. The remaining resolutions are challenges I typically shy away from. Each resolution at a glance is inconsequential, like a penny, but have become exponentially valuable to me in the turbulence of this year.
As I approach the halfway point of my project, there is only one resolution I have failed to start. The one is #19.
Write a blog.
Writing is terrifying to me. I am scared to fail and I am scared to succeed. If I succeed (whatever that means), I am scared to be exposed, to say the wrong thing, to be inarticulate, or even worse boring. I want to be seen, but want to live anonymously. I think that the things I want to write about either won’t be interesting or have already been written by other people. The fear list is long.
In desperate need of an external push to start writing, I turned to Emma Gannon’s skillshare class on silencing self-criticism in creative expression. Toting a bright yellow blouse with an oversized, deep purple collar, Gannon shared numerous ways to generate creative momentum. I cringed the full 43 minutes of the class, knowing that she was the external push I needed. Like a kid taking on the high dive for the first time, I needed to hear the cheers down below, encouraging me to take the leap. All the while I just hoped that Gannon would yell, “This is too high for you right now. You might break all your bones! Just climb back down just the way you came up.” Since you’ve read this far, you know that Gannon deferred my hope.
So this is me plugging my nose and pretending there is a penny at the bottom of the pool that needs saving. Hear that sound? That’s me screaming at the top of my lungs all the way down.
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