Inner Motives

When I was working for lobbyists in D.C. and also waiting tables in the suburbs of that great city in the evenings, there was a man who came in to the coffee shop one night and sat in my section. I’d seen him in there before. He’d been working his way through all of the sections and it was only a matter of time until he found his way to mine. This was a trendy coffee shop with mismatched furniture and plush chairs where patrons lounged for hours and any and all conversations were bound to come up. I’d been working on a piece of writing that I was carrying around in my pocket and in the general course of conversation, this fella asked me about it.

But soon he was not only very interested in my work but he also wanted me to write something specifically for him. He suggested he’d come back in a week and I could show him what I’d written. A homework assignment? I thought. And you’re giving me a deadline?Ugh. I was busy enough and I just wanted to work on my poem. As I’m thinking this, he’s talking away, on and on, about how I could trust him and it would be our special thing and I would write for him and he would read my work and he wouldn’t make any comments that would hurt my feelings and… Aaaand he lost me.

Listen, you don’t go far in Writer School, or most anywhere, really, if you can’t take criticism. I wasn’t some delicate little flower, not then, not now.

No, something in what he was saying gave me a creepy vibe. Actually, I can be more specific than that: He had an ingratiating tone that suggested he was the only person who could understand me and I owed him gratitude for that.

Friends, you know this: We humans--and especially women—have in inner voice, an intuition, a gut feeling. It can be hard to sense with all the noise in the world but when you do sense it, you listen. (It’s a very similar perception that tells you where a story needs to go and what the story is really all about, even if you intended something completely different in your conscious brain. You thought you were writing about a dinner party? Ha! No, you’re really writing about the inner motives of all the dinner guests.)

The man left that day planning to come back a week later to sit in my section. And I got busy. I wrote a poem about strength, about the quiet endurance that sees through the distraction and clutter to the heart of the matter, about a power you possess when you know your own worth.

He did show up a week later and I, well, I did not let him read it. It was too much, even for him. Instead, I stared through him and told him I didn’t need him. And he left the coffee shop and, to my knowledge, never returned.

Maybe that was a day I stood up for myself. A day I didn’t let somebody take advantage of me. A day I wielded the pen of the poetess within.

Or perhaps I crushed his well-meaning soul…

But I lived to tell the tale.

 ~

For more coffee shop adventures, check out my first book Upside Down Kingdom.