You Don’t Need More Talent Or Time

Dear Glennon,

I want to write, but I feel like I’m not special enough. Also, I have no talent or time. Still, I feel this yearning…

YOU! YES! You are the one! Please write. The most important quality in a writer is her certainty that she is not special.

We do not need more artists using art to prove their specialness.

“Special” artists don’t move us.

What moves us are artists who show us that our shared, ordinary human experience is special enough.

No talent? Good, that’s one less thing that might distract us from your message. Art is not for the talented; it’s for the honest.

It’s for folks brave enough to show us who we are and kind enough to love us anyway.

No time? Perfect. Give us raw and hurried over polished and careful. We humans are neither polished nor careful. We are raw and hurried, so we will recognize ourselves in your delivery. Don’t give us someone who knows how to string together lovely words—as if words were flowers and writing simply a matter of arranging them attractively. Give us someone who fills up her trembling hands with her dirty insides and holds them out to us and says, “Are we sure this is dirt? Might it be gold?”

Because after that question—that question that all good art poses—it becomes clear that the magic is not in the art itself.

The magic is the moment after we encounter good art.

It’s the moment when that question hangs in the air between us and the artist—unanswered. The magic is inside that in-between in which we are stunned by the artist’s audacious forgiveness of herself and of us and so we stand there, shaken and flung far from our usual understanding of how alone and dirty we are. While we try to find our balance again, we can’t help but wonder, is it possible that instead of being filled with dirt—I might also be filled with gold?

When I was in second grade, I wrote my first poem. I was a good girl then, all smiles and nice hair and decent grades and always “fine,” you know. But when my teacher asked us to write a poem, I found my pencil scratching the word MAD onto my crisp, clean sheet of lined, white paper. I traced over the word again and again until each letter was thick and black and until there were scratches through the not-so-neat-anymore paper and there were marks all over my desk and the lead from my pencil was worn completely down and my hands were covered in black dust.

Then I put down my pencil.

I stared at my art like I was seeing an x-ray of my insides for the first time.

My teacher walked over and while all the other children had their heads down writing words—long, fancy, impressive words—she stopped behind my desk and lingered over my shoulder. In this moment—immediately after reading One True Word from the insides of a little girl—my teacher was shaken and flung far from her usual understanding of how alone and dirty she was. She leaned down and whispered into my ear, “me too.”

And of course, I looked back at my dirty paper and my tiny, dirty hands and wondered, could this dirt be gold? It’s thirty years later and I’m still trying to write as brave and true as I did when I wore a plastered-on smile and pig tails.

You, the one without time or talent, you are the one. Write, paint, dance as a public service to our human family. Be a servant with your art.

Don’t use it to say “Here I am!” Use it to say “Here we are. We are okay, you know.”

Forget talent and just use your hands.

Large swaths of time are not needed. It took me three minutes to create the most honest piece I’ve ever written: MAD.

Show us how beautiful and brutal we are and love us for it. Give us that moment in which we wonder if we might one day forgive ourselves for this state of being we seem stuck in—this dirty, golden state of humanness.

The only requirement of an artist is this: You must try to love and forgive yourself completely before you create.

If you are ashamed of any part of yourself, you will hide the one thing from us we most need to see. If you keep from us the dirty gold, there will be no in-between moment for us. And the in-between moment is everything.

Only the forgiven and loved can help others be forgiven and loved. Only the free can free others. Don’t be talented, be free.

Write on, friend.