I am what I am

And here’s my 236th blog on WordPress. Can’t keep a good Sam down. Or a bad one.

I started out writing about my writing. What a strange task. And then these posts morphed. Became weekly journaling sessions. An ongoing (and seemingly endless) rumination. On what? Anything and everything. I am not what the kids might call much of an effective content creator. And yet here I’ve gone and created all sorts of content. Content that is content to sit in this tiny little vessel, stationed somewhere on the internet thanks to the fine folks at WordPress who, at the time of this blog, haven’t threatened to rebrand themselves as X.

So here in this blog that started out about my writing I’ll give you a status report. I’m steeped in all the academic writing I’m always doing. Because I’m an associate professor hoping to one day become a full professor. I’ve got plenty of books out already. I have another academic book coming out this fall. Actually, two of them if you include co-edited works. I’m currently sending out queries for a book I wrote with my friend Ben. A satirical campus novel written as emails. Will it get picked up? I don’t know. It’s probably worthy of an NC-17 rating. And now I have this other book coming out. About my relationship with my faith and with improv. Talk about an unexpected project.

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I’ve spent most of my 40-some years on this planet keeping quiet about my faith. Why? I’m not totally sure. Despite the bible verse my father had me memorize as a kid about letting your light shine, I’ve decided not to do what he spent most of his life doing – sharing the good news (loudly) with people whether they wanted to hear it or not. It’s not that I reject my father’s ways, the guy had and continues to have enormous chutzpah, it’s just that’s not me. And I spent lots of my childhood trying to explain my father’s radical Jew-for-Jesusness.

“What is on your dad’s license plate?” one of my friends would ask me during middle school.

“Um, Yeshua,” I’d say.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It’s the Hebrew word for Jesus.”

No amount of explaining or conversation brought such conversations to a neat resolution.

Dad’s radical faith meant I spent most of my childhood attending each and every denomination of Christianity and Judaism you can think of. I’ve seen it all, man. Mostly, my experience in churches left me frustrated or embarrassed. Churches can be so repressive, so political, so unlike the faith I’ve had since I was a child.

And there, despite spending most of my life in secular spaces, I’ve admitted that I’ve had faith since I was a child. I couldn’t say such things as a public school teacher. Or at least, I didn’t. And I feel similarly as a professor at a major public university with a serious stake in anti-racism. I’m a strong advocate of the separation of church and state, despite an increasingly frightening segment of the population. Still, I can’t pretend that my faith hasn’t been a core if not the core part of my identity since way back before when.

I share all of that because I’m having something of a panic attack about releasing a book that is so open about that faith. I’ve kept that side of me distant from most of my professional relationships. And this book is going to make that public to the faithful few who read it.

Why publish such a book? Because it was what I wrote and, tact be damned, I put my writing out into the world. That’s why we’re at 236 of these blogs. The words are available to me, I arrange them, and then I share them. With no hope for validation or compensation. As my hero Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, I do what I muddily must until I bodily bust.

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“Do you think I’m having a midlife crisis?” I asked my therapist last week, trying to figure out where my anxiety was coming from. My general malaise.

“Maybe?” he shrugged.

“Does that mean I’m going to have to buy a sports car?”

“Only if you go through it poorly,” he said.

I laughed. My therapist is funny.

I told him about my faith at our last session and, in so doing, realized that I am not well-equipped to talk openly about my very real and sincere belief in Jesus. Perhaps that is part of what is causing me anxiety right now. Putting out a book about something that triggers something in me I haven’t quite figured out. So be it.

I’m a 43-year-old Sam now. Better to be honest. Better to let the words out without worrying so much about an imagined audience and what they might think about me.

One of my mentors and friends reminded me, during a phone call last week, that I don’t owe anybody an explanation for the way I am. I’ve spent years offering up explanations. Maybe that’s what my memoirs are to a certain extent. Maybe these blogs too. Damn it, friends, as the venerable Popeye once said, I am what I am. And my faith is part of what I am. So that’s going out in the form of a book now too.

A book that promises to have millions of readers. And by millions I mean a handful. It might reach a million typos. I haven’t met a copyeditor yet that I couldn’t break.

I’m learning to be fine with what I make. I do what I must until I bodily bust. And writing helps me keep doing. Keep living. Keep making sense of what I am and what I’m becoming. And I have no intention on bodily busting for a while.