Blogger's Choice: Permission is Paramount by Lisa

I gotta say, I feel like I’ve gotten that gig at GLAMOUR that I lusted after at 16 years of age. It was 2002 and I still thought I was Kate Hudson in How to Lose a Man in 10 days. Remember when your dreams were as original as the movies you saw, books you read and T.V. shows you stared at? Mine were. A lot of them. I even wrote a Dawson’s Creek parody in 8th Grade with the deciduous help of my collaborator at the time, my best friend, Becca. Get to be 30 and you feel like you can now write about anything you want to write about. Anything. In my real and arguably less glamorous Kate Hudson-y version of present day Lisa-Hood- this opportunity has presented itself in 2015 as a Blogger’s Choice assignment for my SU fam and our amazing readers!  

Lisa sets aside her words and lets the music do the talking at her high school's jazz dinner theater

I know what you’re thinking. I have decided to wow you with my mature use of multi-syllabic words (see what I did there), keen knowledge of late 90’s-early aughts pop-culture and wax poetic about old friends and lost dreams. You are, in part, not wrong. I’m going somewhere, come with me.

My girlfriend just invited me to a music festival and I told her I couldn’t go. She asked me why? I told her I was thirty. She told me people that are thirty can still go to music festivals. I told her people that are thirty get to say they don’t want to go and that gets to be reason enough skip out, say no, stay home. I’m too old to go to a music festival to keep the flame alive. That’s shit you do in your early twenties because you are trying to matter to someone. Sometimes it works, it just never did for me. What I think now is that either the flame is alive, or it is not, but I need not suffer crowds, being “ma’am-ed”, everyone’s bodily fluids (all of them) and heat exhaustion just to prove my affection. I can drink and do drugs at home on the couch if I want. I’m grown.

Lisa seriously can't-even right now.

Blogger’s Choice. It’s all blogger’s choice. Think about it. That’s my message. I mean, there have been times in my life where the content of my work was so furiously dictated by the immediacy of pop-cultural replication and unoriginal thought, or my work was so furiously in defense and denial of that very same basic-ass mimicry. You can’t deny culture. That is never a successful gesture. Cute tho. You don’t have to like it or accept it or use it but you cannot deny it.

There was a time when the words that I wrote simply dripped of adoptee angst, mixed-girl feelings, and navel gazing bullshit. And I leaned into the feelings. Into the whole swirl, rip and tangle of it all. It wasn’t a bad thing- and I don’t judge that writer- although I’ve read some of her work and it doesn’t interest me anymore. 

I’m fascinated by the process of aging: as a woman, an artist, a creator. I give fewer shits, I care so much more, Everything, all at once. I have opinions for maybe the first time, maybe in my life. I trust my gut. I believe in myself and trust my perspective. It’s no longer a question of whether or not it is valid. I’ve tested it. I learned from identifying it. I’ve moved on. I speak to my community- or aim to do so.  I think I even know who they are! And when it lands it feels good- but then I remember that I’ve gotten through the occasional writer’s block and missed deadlines and had mind-blowing breakthroughs and connected with an audience, and improvised my ass off with killer musicians, and boffed the fuck out of a gig and all of it. All of it has been blogger’s choice. 

The author, boffing the fuck out.
Photo credit: Bernadette Pollard

Act. Do. Be. Sing. See. Write. LIVE! Don’t go to the music festival. Write that musical. Be the human you were meant to be. Choose.

LMB