The Invitation
By Keely Dickes
These past few months, the first few of my “real” adult life, have been what the old me would call hedonistic. I am not using my college degree in English, journalism, and philosophy. I work the minimal amount in order to rock climb on a weekday when the cliff is quieter, afford gas to go camping, and eat food that's halfway decent for me. I work to climb. I climb because it feels good.
I work. I climb. I watch TV shows with my boyfriend in a warm house that I can afford because of my working. I sometimes read.
But lately, there is a question brewing under my skin, like ants scurrying or a wound festering.
The question is related to words. What am I to them, and what are they to me? They have always come natural to me, like my mind is a funnel ready to scoop them out of the atmosphere and produce some finished product. It's been that way for years, like writing is an open invitation hovering in the background that I can either accept or deny.
Deny. Think of the sound of that. Like writing for me is a part of my truth, and saying “no” to that would be to engage in a kind of falsity. The invitation happens when I'm driving home from work, turning through the winding highway that cuts against the mountains.
I see a character, I see a scene, I see one person's sentiment pushing against the wind—and I feel the total humanity behind that sentiment. It's so raw to me, in that moment, that it almost burns. I sense snippets of truth, like an overheard conversation, but not the whole story. It makes me want to sit down and write the snippets until the whole story comes into view. It makes me want to throw sticks at the half-formed whole until it splinters away into nothing.
Wouldn't no words, no poetic energy at all, be easier than these ill-formed yearnings that come not from me but from the air beyond? It's the same war with words I've had since I was a little girl.
I want them, but I want them whole. I want them fully formed, I want them given to me on a platter, like it often seems they could, should be given. But they are not that way. I am not that way. And so choosing to write would be both effortless and complete effort. I know I don't have to accept the invitation, because if there's one thing I believe in most strongly, it's that you create your own destiny. There is no higher meaning or “right” way to live your life.
This is precisely why I felt free to do what I wanted: I moved to Colorado to rock climb and do what makes me feel alive and chase arguably transient things because I believe in the ultimate transience of everything. Believing that everything will be turned null eventually by its inevitable oblivion set me free.
But believing in this abstractly and being okay with it are two different things.
Where you come from impacts who you are. Expectations are linked to identity, and those are formed early. In fourth grade, we all wrote narrative pieces and our parents came to school to hear us read them. I wrote mine about when I went parasailing with my mom. There was one line about how our feet re-entering the water was like a knife cutting into a tomato. My teacher loved that line. When I read my piece, the room was silent. When I was finished, everyone clapped. This was routine for all the students. Then everyone stood up and kept clapping. This was not routine.
“You write like an eighth-grader,” my teacher said the next day. When I played outside after that, it felt like my feet were on fire and there was a golden warmth in my chest.
I was going to be a writer. I was going to be good. What I would do would matter.
But alas, I have grown up, and I've learned there is such a thing as doing things for the wrong reasons. To perform for recognition, admiration, or even respect does not sit well with me. I've also learned talent does not equal obligation. I know I have some level of talent with writing. The less I think, the better the words fall out: I simply must wait for the wind to come, fasten my sails, and let the words carry me. The oceans they let me access are beautiful. But have I really learned this? Does talent equal obligation? Must one make lemonade if they have lemons? What if they want iced tea, or plain old water?
I am living like plain water. It is clean, ice-cold water that comes from the mountains and tumbles over rocks. The water is like climbing and movement and freedom and all the happiness I want right now. I do not need lemonade or iced tea. Writing is not necessary, it is not easy, it would make me no additional money, it is frustrating. But sometimes I look out toward the horizon, tracing the peaks against the sky, and I feel a slow burning. It is like a mix of curiosity and desire.
What if I wrote?
What if I wrote often, spent some time carving into the wood of words? What statues would I create? But the burning is distant, like the horizon. It is not urgent. It is, again, difficult to write. I'd rather run around or rock climb.
I might be wasting my supposed talent. Or my talent might be nothing at all, just a pretty illusion built up from false perceptions and overeager mentors. People are always looking for talent. It doesn't mean it's really there; people's eyes trick them all the time. We see what we want to see. But as hard as it is to remember my belief, I do have it and it is strong. I believe that whatever I choose to do is okay. Because it is my choice. If I want to cut off my hair, I can cut off my hair, because it is mine. If I want to never write another pretty word, I will never write another pretty word, because I am the one doing the writing. The idea that I owe someone—anyone—anything because I am good at something is erroneous. I disagree with that philosophy.
So I rebel with a different philosophy, one grounded in existentialism. It's about freedom and choice and the idea that you determine your own identity. We are free beings, so I'm going to embrace that and act like one.
One day I was driving home from work and the magnitude of my own freedom hit me. It hit me that I truly didn't have to do anything. The thought struck me dumb. I felt instant weightlessness. I blinked twice, stared mutely out at the road in front of me. My past didn't define me. I didn't need to toil with words for money, or be a writer simply because my third-grade teacher said I was gifted, because my fourth-grade teacher said I'd be the next J.K. Rowling, because my mom says it will “always be in me,” because one philosophy professor said I think in a special, unique way and another that my undergrad paper was better than most of the grad students'. I don't have to use my mind in an academic or creative way.
I don't have to be what they wanted me to be, what they think I should or could be.
There is no should but that which I choose. This is, and has been, my greatest defiance. My most prideful sentiment.
Suddenly I felt the weight from all my professors' voices, their admiring looks, my friends’ and family's beliefs, wash over me. I felt it fall behind me, a pile I was leaving behind. It didn't mean anything. What they saw in me or wanted of me didn't have any power. Not anymore. And then, inexplicably, I started crying. The more I thought about the absence of the weight the more I cried.
“Is this what it means,” I whispered to myself, “to feel truly free?”
I wasn't sad or happy. I felt neither, and I felt both. The next day, I thought of it again, and I cried again. What was that profound emotion I was feeling? How could I put words to it? I am still not sure, but I think I was crying for me.
I was crying because in some deep, strange way, I realized my power. My internal power of choice—to do whatever the hell I want with my life, and with no one to call responsible but myself.
Ironically, I still feel the onslaught of words like some distant monsoon or tempting wave. But they are mine (despite the fact that they come from the ether, a quality I will never understand) and not for anyone else. If the writing occurs, and I truly have no idea if it will or not, it will be a new era of my writing.
One of freedom, and one on my terms.
Keely Dickes is an American climber and writer, formerly an intern for the climbing magazine Rock and Ice. Follow her travels on Instagram @keely.dickes.
