72. Never Been a Natural

In the words of our lord and savior, Taylor Allison Swift, Nora has never been a natural. She’s a trier. Here’s to the triers. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

INTRO MUSIC 

There is no Taylor Swift lyric that speaks quite to my soul, like this one from her song mirror ball. I’ve never been a natural. All I do is try, try, try. I am a pretty diehard swifty, and I love this line of Taylor’s, like so many of her lines because it does feel like she’s peering into my soul.

She’s describing me. That is the power, obviously, of a good writer, but I do like to be good at things and I like to be good at them right away. This is not something that is special about me. A lot of people like that feeling. The feeling of mastery, the feeling of perfection. I am not often described as a very chill person.

I don’t love playing new games. I’ll give up halfway through a new project. If I’m met with the slightest amount of resistance, I’m still stuck. On level two of Duolingo Spanish after several years of paying for the app, trying is a scary thing for a lot of people. And for me to try anything is to risk something.

Your reputation, your livelihood, your pride, and there is a pre, and there is a pressure in our culture to appear effortless, carefree. A natural. My math career fell apart very early when my teachers insisted that we show our work. It was suddenly no longer good enough to just guess at what the numbers swimming on the page in front of me might add up to.

I had to show how I got there, but I didn’t know how I got there or if I got there and the kids around me would cover their tests or build little fortresses out of folders, so I just stopped trying. It was so embarrassing to try. Still not get it right that I just stopped trying. I got a message from a person recently who wanted to know how they could possibly move forward after they tried something big and audacious with their words and it didn’t work out.

The shame that I could feel seeping through my phone screen or projecting that shame onto this anonymous messenger. Was so heavy. I was back in math class. I was back in my early twenties knowing that if I didn’t apply for a job in media, I couldn’t be rejected from a job in media. I was writing anonymous blogs that one or two people read me and either my mom or my friend Dave.

I was back trying to look like I wasn’t trying when I was trying so hard. I do try. So, so hard. But you know what? I don’t always do? I don’t always show my work partially because I do have ADHD, and it’s just difficult to do anything. I’m partially because I think, honestly, who cares? Who cares? Who cares what I did, how I did it?

But if you are a person who has struggled to try and who feels intense amounts of shame around the things that didn’t work out, Come and sit here, baby. Cuz I’m going to tell you a few things that I tried that didn’t work out.

Ooh. This one still makes me cringe. Before my first book came out, I really wanted to see it in Target, cuz who wouldn’t? Right? Well, I looked up their book buyer on LinkedIn and I sent them a copy of my book with a note about how my dead husband worked at Target Corporation out of college and I hoped they would consider stalking my book.

I didn’t hear back from them directly, but I got a really harsh email from my publisher that made me feel so embarrassed, like such a has seeded that I couldn’t even look at the target building in downtown Minneapolis. And I honestly can’t believe that I’m sharing that story because I was so embarrassed that I thought I could just do that when really, why wouldn’t I think I could?

I thought I was just being proactive. Apparently I was being deeply embarrassing. The book was never in Target, by the way. Between my second book and my most recent book, I wrote at least five book proposals that not one publisher on this green Earth wanted. Not one, Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Not one single soul.

Read my proposals and thought I would pay for that book. None. None. Rejected, rejected, rejected. I started an organization in the wake of my husband’s death, still kicking, RIP. You were good while you lasted and I had to close it. I had to close it. It wasn’t working. It didn’t work out, kind of served its purpose and then didn’t need to exist anymore.

And if you have not had to close something that you started to keep someone’s memory alive. Ooh, that was rough. That destroyed me for a while. Um, in high school I was a founding member of the girls golf team. After one tournament, I was right at the worst golfer in the state of Minnesota. I scored a 24 on one hole. 24. 1 hole.

Also, the girl whom my boyfriend was dating on the side was there and she did not get last place. Okay. My dad, This is not my thing, but my dad spent his entire adult life secretly working on short stories and novels. I mentioned in 2013 when in, oh my God, in 2013, when he was still alive, I mentioned that I wanted to write a book someday, and he told me not to tell anyone that because then they would know if it didn’t work out.

I didn’t know when he said that to me then that in his closet was an entire box of unpublished writing of his own, that he hadn’t told anyone his own aspirations because the idea of them being aware of his efforts and the lack of outcome would be too much for him to bear. And I don’t wanna act as though failure or.

Quitting or things not working out or not even getting the chance to work it out isn’t painful or consequential sometimes. But the only person who has never failed is a person who has never tried, and I don’t know a single person who hasn’t swung and missed and sometimes fallen on their butt from the momentum.

Does it make it easier? To know that Maybe, maybe not. Do we keep trying anyways? God, I hope so. God, I hope so. There is not a single thing that I am a natural at other than trying and today that’s gotta be enough.

OUTRO MUSIC

I’m Nora McInerny and this is, it’s going to be okay. Our okay things are different every day and they vary. Oh, do they vary. We love to get your okay things so you can email them to us. You can record a voice memo and email it to us. You can call us. All the details are in our show descriptions. It’s going to be okay, is a production of Feelings and Co.

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CREDITS