But what could be done to be any different than the way my brain works naturally? What can any of us do to reshape our abilities and skills? How can we really reroute our choices of subject matter, our imaginations? Can we? Can we take on the talents of others? Their goals? Their life work? Can we work against our own grain and be like the other writers we adore?
The lesson with Shannon ended up more like a therapy session than a knitting lesson. There’s nothing wrong with me besides the fact that I am myself. There’s nothing wrong with any of us. There is nothing keeping us from the page we want to write or wish we could write besides our very selves. I am extremely oriented to the left side of my body. I am left-footed, being unable to stand with my right foot forward on a skateboard or even envision standing on a snowboard. Until a student told me, I didn’t even know they make left-footed snowboards. Are there left-eyed cameras? Should there be? It was only in the past few years that I suddenly realized one day that I hold a traditional camera fully in front of my face. I was a photography major way back in college, yet in three decades I never ever noticed how dominantly left-eyed I am.
Many skills have been a challenge for me. Maybe being left-handed and fighting all those tiny battles situated me perfectly to be a writer, always revising and editing and reshaping, because I had to develop and incredible amount of patience early on. Maybe I am only a writer because of hurdles. And the hurdles are very specific to me. And so I should understand them and appreciate them and even be glad for my own hurdles. They are unique to me. 
I am not handicapped because I’m left-handed, yet I have had to work very hard to learn within the constraints of my native abilities. I have to work within and be keenly aware of my own body, mind, talents, abilities, and I also have to be aware of my limitations, that I end where I end, that I am whole, that the writing I create will only be whole if I welcome wholly the creative choices I make, and understand the whole shebang, the whole kettle of fish is mine. That jealousy is illogical, cruel to myself, and pretty ridiculous. I’m wasting time drooling over somebody else’s sirloin tips when right in front of me is a smorgasbord!
I chose to be a writer, deliberately. And I may envy the visual artist, the dancer, the actor. But writing is the creative field I chose out of all others. I spent my whole childhood determined to be a pianist. In college I switched to the visual arts. In graduate school, I got an MFA in creative writing. I have determined my own creative ambitions and wishes. All of the hours I’ve spent learning diligence and making creative choices in anything? I bring that to the page with me. I have brought the failure of my first knitting lesson home, and I’m writing about it to make meaning of the day. I fit on the page. I cannot try to wear someone else’s habit or skill, not in the way they would achieve it, anyway.
I’m also reminded that I need to try new things and be willing to fail. That it can be joyous to fail. Writers need to be willing to have accidents, to go days and weeks without “results.” And within that vein, there’s a lesson for any teacher. I teach creative writing, just as many writers do. It’s critical for me—for us all—to think about how anxiety-provoking, how nerve-wracking it is to attempt any new skill. But writing? How emotional, how intimate. The new writer is even more vulnerable than those of us publishing, and just think how tender-hearted we can be! Writers are so sensitive. Trying a new skill gave me fresh reminders.
And back to jealousy, or envy, or coveting, whatever you call it: We don’t really consider WHY it’s seen as a sin. It’s a sin because it’s a waste of time and energy. I need to read other writers and be a good literary citizen and learn from the bounty out there—with humility and admiration—and then move back to my own page. Writing isn’t the venue of the immature, like some thirteen-year-old girl who wants hair like somebody else. Writing is for the lion-hearted and the bold. And writers can’t be audacious if they’re simpering around wasting time wishfully thinking they had a better vocabulary or imagination or experiences. Wish in one hand. . . We all have plenty to write about forever by the time we’re thirty, probably. We have to mind our own garden path with its flowers and scents, not be constantly peering over the neighbor’s fence. Jealousy is ultimately illogical. You cannot have the writing career someone else has. You have to have your own.
For me a great step to take when I face the page is to feel grateful. I’m so lucky. I’m so fortunate that I have lived a creative life. Shannon and I have taught together for twenty years plus. But until I stood in her living room in awe of her new loom and the gorgeous weaving she’s doing, I’d never understood the depth of her creative life.
I said, “I just don’t know how everyone doesn’t have something creative to do.” I often say this to myself.
She answered, “I know!” And we looked each other in the face in what I feel was a new way, as compatriots in the arts.
Instead of ever wasting a second wishing I could have written something “like” someone else, I need to spend my time being amazed that I can write at all. Where does it all come from, the energy and inspiration in these creative lives we live? My mother asked me once how long it took me to write a certain poem. I answered with absolutely zero snark, in awe to realize it: “Forty-eight years.” My whole life. It takes my whole life to write everything I ever write. If we are fully engaged, it takes every writer’s whole life to come to the page ready. If we waste one moment feeling jealous of other writers—or on the other hand unworthy of doing the same task—we are robbing our own energies.
And so when we’re writing, we’re actually not in those rooms alone. Shannon is not alone when she is knitting and weaving and spinning. She is tapping into hundreds and even thousands of years of knowledge in the fiber arts. She is raising animals bred for the quality of their fibers over centuries. When we writers write, we are tapping into the same energy that drove every writer before us—Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf and writers and thinkers and artists and sculptors whose names we will never even know. But we are also tapping into the same energy that drives the writers in the community around us currently, concurrently. If we believe for even a second that one of these writers somehow doesn’t doubt, doesn’t struggle, doesn’t wish for more? Then we’re just idiots.
We will all come to the page and the screen with more ease only when we know that we belong right there, in that chair with that pen and notebook we chose, or in that desk chair looking at that screen. Each individual voice is worthy of speaking and saying exactly only what that individual has lived to say. Each of us has important raw material, and much editing to tend to, and a vital role to play in the community of writers. Jealousy has zero place among us.
But I think I’d still like to try knitting just once more.
