Cowardly Bravery

“Practicing courage, compassion, and connection in our daily lives is how we cultivate worthiness. The key word is practice.” —Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

I am tempted to copy down more of the paragraph from page 7 of Brown’s book, but I will resist. Reading through some posts at an earlier iteration of The Ruff Draft has me rather horrified. I can’t believe how blind I was to the fear and the “I learned the lesson; give me an A” mindset that was running the writing show. Daja Gombojav, a wise and wonderful woman I know not quite well enough from the kids’ youth ministry days and social media, recently wrote about holding disparate feelings in your heart, mind, and body at the same time, and I see now how that came into play when I was struggling for so long to let my real voice be heard. For too many years, The Ruff Draft was more of a commonplace book than anything I should have attached my name to. It was a gallery, a place for me to show off everything I knew, all that I was reading and learning. Just yesterday, I found a post that was 1100 words long. Of those 1100, nearly all of them (900) were copied down and shared from a book, and what a boring book it was: How to Win an Argument by Marcus Tullius Cicero (selected, edited, and translated by James M. May). All the while I was typing in those many words, I imagine I was patting myself on the back for having the courage to share, but what I was actually doing was protecting myself by trying to let others speak for me. The bravery I was exercising in publishing anything online was negated by the cowardliness that kept me from owning my thoughts. I am embarrassed that I could be so unaware, and I shan’t try to make excuses. I shall merely apologize to anyone who tried to read that crap. So, to all of you who did, I am sorry.

What strikes me over and over as I look back at this stuff is how hard I tried to protect myself. I almost never went out on a limb, and when I bothered to use my own words, they were couched in mamby-pamby qualifications.

I don’t know that it’s ironic that it took being censored one too many times by big tech social media companies to push me to finally dig up the courage to do what I had been failing at for so long: to write, to really write. No, I don’t think it’s mere irony; more likely, poetic justice.