Getting Lost

Between the Known and Unknown = Living

I was going to write something else this week, something autumnal, but I’ve been reading the news. The news made me feel utterly lost. As in the hopeless-ish kind. But I remembered how often I have been lost in this life. Literally and figuratively. And I remembered how being lost is also simply being alive.

I’m lost so often, I realized, that I already wrote a whole chapter about it in my book, Do You Feel Like Writing? A Creative Guide to Artistic Confidence, where I tell a story about how getting lost can be part of the way to get somewhere. That there is a lot of lostness on our way to somewhere. Then I was reminded of how many times I’ve been lost, or the world has been lost, and how what can be important is the living through it, the paying attention, the seeing what there is to learn, the seeking of strength, the figuring out who we are in the face of things, and the fact that we are all in the lostness, again and again, together.

A note on my artist friend’s wall

“Being lost is a state of not-knowing. We pass in and out of this state throughout our lives, and during the creation of any text. It can be uncomfortable, non-linear, unpredictable, and frightening. Learning to be comfortable in moments of transition and figuring out how to access your fifth brain anywhere are ways of managing lostness.

Once I got lost (literally) in a way that marked a turning point in my writing life (conceptually). I was in my early 20s, and I started to feel alien in my world. I lived in a city that didn’t feel right. My boyfriend and I lived in a faux-wood apartment complex, and we worked jobs that seemed like they might have to do with our future careers. Our friends were going to have a baby, so we all talked about that. Other friends wanted to buy a house; we talked about that. We talked about higher paying jobs, saving money, buying houses, all of which were things I felt I should want, being in my 20s. But I didn’t want them. What I wanted didn’t show up in the conversations that I had with my friends.

At the time, I was trying to be a writer. I worked at a bookstore because the job placed me closer to the books I wanted to create, but really, I was in retail, ringing up purchases and writing poems on receipts, participating in meetings about overhead and inventory. My role in this retail life always seemed off to me. One night after work, I accidentally boarded the wrong bus home. When I realized, my heart filled with joy. I was on the wrong bus! I could have stood and rung the bell and walked back down the long driveway to start my journey over on the right bus, but I wanted to stay and see what would happen. It felt like finally, something was happening. I beamed at my fellow passengers and thought, Let’s get fucking lost. I got out my notebook. We drove into the heart of the city, where I’d only been once or twice. I scribbled descriptions. I made up narratives about the other riders. People got on and off the bus. We drove all the way through the city and into the outskirts, into neighborhoods I didn’t recognize. I stared out the window at other people’s houses and wondered what they ate for dinner.

It was an uncanny trip. All of us passengers were thrown off the bus at one point, and we stood around in the middle of a neighborhood until the next bus picked us up. It got dark while I rode this second bus. Then the second bus broke down. All the passengers sat in the dark. I could barely contain my pleasure and I scribbled feverishly. How had it come to this? I had no idea where I was. I was alone! I could be this alone! The world could be this big and busy and I could vanish. And I would write. Be anywhere and write!

That strange night, in the darkness of the second broken-down bus, I broke, too. I broke from the wrong life. I broke from expectations and assumptions. I broke from the knowledge of how things were. A third bus picked us up and dropped me back on the very same square of sidewalk I’d departed from hours earlier.

For the next couple of days, I wrote incessantly. I filled notebooks with emphatic, clear, feverish pages of text, and I read. In Robert Boswell’s novel, Geography of Desire, a wonderful storyteller, Ramon, stares at a spark of light on water and decides he must give up storytelling. In the beige-carpeted bedroom of that apartment complex, that spark of light flew straight through the pages of the book into me. Through ink and paper, through a time-space-continuum of one writer’s imagination to another, it hit me like a bus. I wasn’t just trying to be a writer, I was a writer, and I simply wasn’t living the right life. I didn’t want, like other people wanted, babies and a house and a job and security. I believed in being rapt, absorbed, no longer visible, getting on wrong buses, hearing stories, telling stories. I wanted to accept the darkness, the strangers, the unfamiliar city streets. Getting lost, it turned out, was part of the sacred fabric of my life.

After that bus trip, I decided that I would get comfortable with being lost. I would anchor my life not to the security of tradition, but rather, to the making of narrative. I would have jobs, but I would know they weren’t the only thing that mattered. I would translate the world into stories and be found. This revelation forever connected acts of being lost to acts of writing for me, knowing that lostness could indicate an entrance.” (from Do You Feel Like Writing? A Creative Guide to Artistic Confidence by Frankie Rollins)

Do you feel like writing?

• Write about the inevitability of lostness.

• Where in the body do you store your lostness? Write about it.

• This existence is a series of crossroads. Make a list of all the times you have been lost, faced a decision, made the decision and moved forward. You have survived being between the known and the unknown so many times, and we will face it again.

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  And look, here’s what happened after all those lot of years of lostness. I found a way to get found, and to help others find themselves. Let’s get you a road map towards writing some of the things you’ve discovered in your lostness. At the Fifth Brain Collective, we believe in curiosity and the resilient human spirit and the value of being part of a community. I’m here to help. Follow this link to my calendar.