Fear of the Ball

I can’t overcome the feeling that I’m talking to the camera these days.

Like I’m winking at you, making a caustic aside about my life, hyper-aware of how I look on the monitor.

When I started writing—and I use that verb deliberately—it was like talking to myself. It was like the diary I kept for 14 years. It felt private, an echo chamber where I could listen to my thoughts and sort them out. I wrote, seeking clarity.

I also wrote seeking work. I left professional journalism behind many, many years ago, and those muscles were atrophied. Three years of almost daily writing brought those muscles back to life. I am a well-oiled machine now, like I was back then, in the newsroom.

Phone cradled in between shoulder and ear, I’d bark questions at my source, typing in a made-up shorthand no one else could have understood. While my editor sat nearby, foot tapping impatiently, I’d write up 15 inches of copy—snap!—slug it, and send it over for review.

Twenty minutes later, I’d stand by the wax machine, run the slender column of my words through the presser, and trot over to production where the paste-up crew ran their roller over it, adhering it to the blue-outs.

Two hours later, hot newsprint in my hands.

Years passed between that moment and my first, tentative posts here. It was hard-going, those first weak essays and photos of an 18-month-old Poo. But soon I was writing every day, more and more agile at the keyboard.

Eventually, I created a body of work that helped land me professional work, work that helps put shoes on my kids’ feet.

The thing is, I’m starting to feel self-conscious again.

It feels harder to reach inside and find the honesty that has become my trademark. The lyricism I found in motherhood eludes me now, as I struggle to find footing as woman and a wife. I don’t need this space to get work anymore. I built a portfolio on the foundation of this blog, and rarely now do I point clients here.

I’m back where I was all those years ago, in the newsroom. I should be pitching magazines and abandoning this place for The Big Show.

But I don’t.

I linger here, where it is safe.

I fear the ball, you see.

Successful athletes are willing to do anything to win, to sacrifice their bodies, to let the ball hit them. They know they can get back up again. They do not flinch when that hurtling orb comes at them in the heat of the game.

The pitch, they catch. They do not fear the ball.

Me? Terrible athlete. I cringe every time the ball spins in the air.

So here I sit, lobbing softballs at you, while the tough guys go out and get knocked down. But for every fall they take, for every thud of the ball against their flesh, there is a point scored, a game won in overtime.

Sometimes I’m led back to words drafted months, even years, ago. I read them, marveling that they came from my fingertips. Sometimes they are terrible, but sometimes … sometimes? They are very good.

I wonder then, why I’m still hiding here.

I wonder if I will ever feel the sting of ball hitting flesh, or if I will continue to sit on the bench while the rest of the world takes the field.