A few days ago, my brother showed me the story he’s writing and asked, “Am I using the word ‘I’ too much? Almost all of my sentences start with it.”
I leaned closer, read a few paragraphs. “It’s the first draft, Coburn. You’ll be able to edit this later.”
“But don’t you think I should stop using so many I’s?”
“Maybe. You’ll get the hang of it as you continue writing, though.” I opened a document on my own computer, scrolled through the novel I’m writing while Coburn writes his and my sister, Katie, writes hers (we started a writing club during isolation). I showed him examples where I had done the same—paragraph after paragraph with I, I, I at the beginning—and examples where the structure of sentences made it so I was replaced with other words.
We ended our writing club meeting for the day, and I think my brother will be able to sort this out.
But in real life, this is still a struggle for me.
You’re all me, me, me, aren’t you?
Self-focused. My friend and mentor told me I suffered from it not too long ago. He meant it kindly and honestly. I agreed—it’s a problem. When I think about it in theory, I cringe and wish I was better. But I ignore dealing with it almost every single day.
If I look at how I operate, I try to center life around my comfort. My desires. My wants and needs. My space. My health. Even if I disguise this as concern for another person, it somehow ends up circling right back to things being the way I want them to be.
I know better. I’ve learned better. But I still too often think everything is all about me, what I can do, how much I can create, how creative I can be.
The pendulum
My self-focus breeds a sort of an extreme pendulum. On one side, it’s got:
Pride. Pride is a struggle for me. I am proud of the work I create and proud when I am the best. I am extremely competitive (something I am proud of, even as I write this), and pride comes out in huge amounts when I do something I can mark as a win or success.
Then I swing the other way.
I easily become discontent, which turns into the degradation of the value of myself and my work. I am discontent when someone’s life looks and sounds better than mine, when another writer’s writing reads better than mine. I try to tell myself it is humility because now I am thinking about how good everyone else is and how I can’t compare. On this side of things, it becomes easy to think, “If I must not be prideful, and if I must think of others before myself, I now see my work isn’t all that good. And I don’t need to work at making it good.”
This isn’t a pendulum I want to swing on. Yet my thought processes and actions shout “higher, higher!” constantly, so it continues.
But there is hope.
As C.S. Lewis writes in The Screwtape Letters (which I am currently reading—it is excellent),
“[God] wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without it being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. [God] wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor’s talents…”
It is hard. I am still too prideful of what I can accomplish, and I get too discontent when I do not think I am good enough.
But maybe we should start with fewer I’s and find joy in our work, in creating what we create, while finding the same level of joy in the work of others.
Instead of pride, joy.
Instead of discontentment and degradation, joy.
It’s not about me, it is about Someone else—and that is a beautiful, good, true thing.
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back soon.
Oh, and here’s a picture my sister, Katie, took of Andy, Barney, and Kevin, our family’s new little ducklings.
They almost fell asleep, all three curled up in my hands, earlier today. I love them.
Loving your conclusion AND the names of the ducks AND your writing club AND the quote from C.S.Lewis. Me