I spent my weekend watching and thinking. I saw David Sedaris’s (completely sold-out) reading at Town Hall. He took questions from the audience. I was sitting in the fourth row. I asked him the exact question I was asked at my own reading, the same question I always ask authors. “Is there anything you regret writing that was published?” He responded with a story about a French teacher of his. He wrote about how awful she was in a magazine, and a while later, he received thirty or so head-shots of people with a note attached on the school letterhead reading, “these are all the people you hurt by writing that article.” “But that’s not what I regret,” he added. “What I regret is that I didn’t show her funny side too. Making someone mean is easy.” Making someone human is hard, I thought. Then I worried I might have been too hard on the people in my book. But I didn’t create them; they’re not characters but people in my life. I guess it’s hard, really hard, to see the good in those we’ve abhorred for so long. I’m still working on humility.
I realized while listening to his responses to the question & answer session that sometimes when people ask you a question, they don’t always just want an answer. They want to hear you talk more. Knowing this, I will respond differently next time, or try to, to really open up more. The truth is, I took down one post a long time ago that I regret ever posting. It was about a birthday party I attended, as a guest. Well, wait, maybe I’ll wait to answer this in person at my next reading. A story to look forward to.
Speaking of forward, I’d been looking forward to covering the Omega Being Fearless conference for about a month. It was worth the wait and, in a word, remarkable. I highly encourage people to attend it next year. It’s worth the money, the time, and the investment in yourself. The problem is, if I’m going to recount all that I learned there, I need more time to tell it. It takes too long to get to it all. So in the coming posts, I’ll try to explain all that I learned.
