I’m Going to Need to Hold Myself Down

Bravery doesn’t always choose to manifest itself in feelings or even posture, but if it did, it would look something like this.

My 6-year-old fell on the playground this month and split open his head. Last month his sister did the exact same thing. So he knew, from her accounts, exactly what the play-by-play procedure was to stitch up such a cut. As we drove to the hospital I listened to the discussion unraveling between him and his younger brother. “Now here’s how it is. I’m going to need to hold myself down. See, when this happened to Charis, she was scared and she didn’t know what to expect, and the nurses and doctors had to hold her down. But I know what’s coming, and I know I can hold myself down, so that’s what I’m going to do. But I can’t have you saying things like, ‘Oh my that looks like it’s going to hurt!’ Or, ‘Ouch that’s a big cut.’ I can’t have you saying those things or I’ll get scared and I’ll sit up fast and I’ll make the doctors poke themselves with a needle, and I don’t want to do that. So you can’t say anything. You can watch, but you can’t say anything to scare me.” It’s one thing to go through something blindly. It’s another thing to be in full awareness of the truth, and to know the truth sometimes hurts. Both have their pros and cons, but sometimes when you know what is coming, you kind of wish you didn’t. My heart nearly exploded in my chest when I heard this kiddio conversation in the backseat. I felt pressed on heavily. And I felt breathless at the wisdom beyond ages. What a little guy to voice the expression of holding oneself down. This is the sort of holding down that even we free-spirits understand. It is as Anne Lamott eludes to occasionally on twitter, what she is writing may reek like excrement, but she sure as hell is going to keep her butt in the seat. She’s going to hold herself down, so to speak. The self that wants to resist. The self that says “You are going to completely embarrass yourself.” The self that says, “I mean really, what’s the point?” The point is, I want this. I’m self-aware enough to know that I want this. That this is what keeps the artist from throwing herself off a cliff. And so you can tell me “You shouldn’t take this so seriously,” or “slow down girl, you’re killing yourself to make this happen. Take it easy.” But once you’ve determined this is a matter for which holding oneself down is of absolute importance and necessity, then you get brave enough to tell those around you, “You can watch, but you can’t say anything that scares me. You can’t say anything that’s going to make me freak out and snap my paintbrush in two or throw my laptop out the window. You just can’t.” And then you proceed as this young boy of mine did. You accept the tools that help you sit still. (For him it was numbing medicine and a Spiderman book. For us, as artists, it may be all sorts of self-bribery – music, drinks, chocolates, incense, etc.) And then you go through with it. Even though your belly is in knots from the anticipation. You go through with it, and you find that when it’s over you hardly even realized it began. You sit through three stitches and you don’t cry and you don’t squirm and you hold yourself down because someone’s got to do it, and you’d rather it be your own gut, your own intuition. your own instinct rather than someone else’s will forced upon you. And with an artist, well, I reckon you make it your aim to do it all again tomorrow. And you call it brave. You call it ridiculously brave.