Advice

My 39th birthday provides an opportunity to look back over the past few years: the changes, the steps forward, the steps backward, the progress, the detours, the achievements, the successes, the mistakes, the days lost, the battles won.

Today, I asked myself this question: “If I could go back in time twenty-years and tell my 19-year-old self three things, what would I say?”

1) Be honest about who you are and how you feel. All any of us have to offer the world is ourselves; I regret that I spent so much energy and so much time concealing myself.

I’d advise Younger Mark to come out, to have the courage and the confidence to own his feelings and step away from the closet. I’d encourage him to pay attention to the still, small voice urging him to leave the church of his youth and explore a broader spirituality. I’d want him to more bold and less ruled by fear.

2) Get to Jackson, Mississippi, and meet Clyde earlier. While potentially disastrous (maybe Clyde and I met when we did for a reason), it would be hard not to urge Younger Mark to at least look in on the man who would make his life complete.

Once, years before I really met Clyde, I stood at the check-out counter at the video store and almost struck up a conversation with him. Had I done so, would we have just celebrated our thirteenth anniversary instead of our tenth? If my nineteen year old self had driven to Jackson in 1984, would we be celebrating our 20th year together this year?

3) Write for at least one hour, every day. Finish what you start. Send it out. As a young man, I started dozens of novels, wrote tons of short stories … and then did nothing with them.

I’m living such a dream right now; I’m so thankful for my publisher’s interest in my work and the company’s willingness to promote what I’m doing. I’m so exctied to see something I’ve written coming to a Borders or Books-a-Million or a Barnes and Noble. Maybe it took almost four decades of tempering and maturity to make these books possible … but maybe I could have, with a little “buckling down,” gotten started much earlier.

Even without the advice above, though, things have turned out pretty well. I have a man who really loves me, who goes out of his way to make my life happier, more stable, more exciting, more fun. I am writing books for a living (he says, crossing his fingers and praying for reasonably good sales of the upcoming titles). I am blessed with good friends and good times. I am healthy. I am sane. I feel closer to a Great Big God, a God unconstrained by the small minds of small men who mistake their own conclusions for the decrees of deity. I’m free to be me. I’m closer to my family than ever.

Maybe, in the end, all I’d tell Younger Mark is: “Hang on — because life gets better, much better, every passing day.”