I dig ditches

If you give me the opportunity for self-importance, I will take it.

I’m a storyteller! I say it like I’m a Viking, raising my axe/pen at the stern of my storied drake ship. I weave tales! I make you feel things! (Here is where I should drop the analogy, because I don’t think my goal is to stab you and steal your chickens or rob your monastery.)

But there are times I think about what I do and feel a swell in my chest like I’m the one who invented stories and later I look back and it just reeks to high Asgard.

And it’s easy to believe the hype when so much of what I do is outward-facing: you read my stories, you watch my movies —I still find it wild to believe that so many of you take the time.

There are often lovely texts, comments, or messages. You say how much of yourself you saw in a story, or you tell me you loved it. I save them. Because some days, I’m too busy looking at the numbers on the far shore of success and fame from the deck of my drake ship to notice the encouragements you’re heaping onto me, like little notes from home drifting to me in bottles bobbing on the sea.

The truth is, I’m not a Viking. Hopefully I smell better, and if I met a monk, he wouldn’t be afraid I’d stab him. But even in the metaphorical sense, I think a better description of me is a ditchdigger.