When I moved to Austin for graduate school in 1998, I found myself in a rut. I was working, and teaching, and reading, and writing papers. I was excelling. And I was bored.
I joined an improv troupe. Suddenly, six times a weekend, I threw myself on stage and flung myself at the whims of the audience.
I’d done improv for years, and I was good at it. But here was the catch. This improv troupe? They did a lot of singing. Pop songs about spatulas, fairy tales recreated as rock operas, and epic throwdown rap battles. And I? I did not sing.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like singing—I was a musical theater girl through and through. But my senior year in high school, during auditions for our school production of Pippin, the theater director said in passing, “Jodi, I’d cast you in a second as the Leading Player…if only you could sing.”
I laughed it off at the moment, but I was crushed. Devastated. Heartbroken. I had no idea that she thought I couldn’t sing. I had no idea I couldn’t sing. I sang! I sang all the time! I sang in choir, in the vocal jazz ensemble, and in every school musical since fourth grade. I sang with our honor chorus at Lincoln Center in seventh grade.
But suddenly. Suddenly I heard that I could not sing. And I took that message and I stitched it onto my heart in gold embroidery floss.
I had options here—I could take voice lessons. I could focus on all my successful singing experiences. Or I could hear that “no” and let it define me. At age 18, that’s exactly what I did. My theater director casually rejected me. But I chose to let that rejection define me.
I did not sing again for seven years. And I rewrote my history, reimagining all my time on stage in a janky, minor key. I started imagining that my repeated casting as the comic relief character was not because I’m a damn good comic performer, but because they had to find a role for she-who-could-not-sing.
But now here I was, in Austin, a mostly-adult, cast in an improv troupe that expected me to sing in every show. An improvised song. In a musical style chosen by the audience.
I panicked. I thought about quitting the troupe. I dreaded rehearsals, terrified that we’d work on singing and I’d be cut down for my terrible voice.
And then I got on stage.
I still remember my first song. It was a drumline march about toys. It was…not particularly good. I sang too fast, stumbled over myself, and made my one friend in the audience visibly cringe (no, she wasn’t invited back to any more shows). But I did it. I got up on stage and sang.
And once I did it, it was less scary. More exciting. In time, the musical games were my favorite. Am I a good singer? I have no idea. But can I rock an improvised polka song about your cousin’s extra nipple? Oh yes. Yes I can.
Truth is, there’s something worse than being rejected. And that’s never stepping onto the stage.
Over the past few years, I’ve worked to untangle other deeply held negative beliefs about myself. I joined a weekly poetry writing group. When the first challenge came in—a few words to use in a poem due the next week—I broke out in a cold sweat. I spent most of that week overwriting, and overwriting, and trashing, and overwriting, and raging.
But three weeks in, I was able to move beyond the constant negative chatter in my head. It wasn’t writing amazing poems that let me reject my own sense that I couldn’t write poetry. It was just writing poems. And writing poems. And writing poems.
This year’s project is rejecting my belief that I am wholly unathletic. I’m pushing myself to move…fast. I’ve started roller derby training.
I rolled in the first day barely able to stand up on skates. And before that session ended I had fallen flat on my bottom. Not while skating–while standing and listening to instruction. Flailing arms, flinging legs…it was awkward and painful. And embarrassing. I can’t do this, I started to tell myself. I’m going to suck at this, I whined. Okay then, suck at it. But do it.
Within weeks, I was whipping other women around the rink, weaving through lines of fellow skaters, and skating in a tight pack. I’m never going to play professional roller derby. But I sure can skate, and I’m having a blast. And it’s hard, and it’s scary, and I’m embracing the tingle in my spine and pushing myself.
I don’t always succeed. Sometimes I fall flat on my face. But I’ve learned that I’d much rather face the rejection than never take the risk.
Most recently, my husband Owen and I started writing a book together—This Word Now, a collection of stories, essays, and exercises on writing and creativity. Our title stems from our approach to teaching writing—turn off your internal editor, turn off your internal judge, and just put down this word, and the next word, and the next word. Be present, be open, say yes to your ideas, and give yourself space for the words to flow.
We’ve chosen to crowdfund the writing and publication through Kickstarter, which means we’re asking people to buy our book before we even write it. We’re standing up in front of all our friends, our community, and requesting support. It could be the biggest rejection of all time. We could look really foolish. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s this: any venture free of the risk of failure is also free of the opportunity for real success.
I now see that any rejection offers a choice—I can choose to believe the rejection, or I can choose to face the challenge and create who I am. And it turns out, who I am is a loud-singing, poetry-writing, roller-skating, badass book writer.
__
Jodi Egerton has her Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas at Austin, where she served as the Assistant Director of the Division of Rhetoric and Writing and the Training Specialist at the Undergraduate Writing Center. She conducts workshops that combine improvisation games with writing exercises to energize writers and encourage breaking through writer’s block. She also teaches workshops on effective writing strategies; the nuts and bolts of clear, concise writing; and communication and team-building. Some of her clients include the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business, Acton MBA, Dell, and 3M. She and her husband Owen are running a Kickstarter campaign to write and publish their book This Word Now. She also crafts custom poems on vintage typewriters with Typewriter Rodeo. And of course, she skates with the Texas Rollergirls Rec League, under the derby name Jazz Hands.