All knowledge is valuable, so I read everything without judging. If I don’t like it, I do not finish and I do not feel guilty. I don’t sit through movies I’m not enjoying, either. My time is precious to me, because when I am not taking something in, I am creating. Watching someone else’s work takes time away from my own, so it has to hold my attention. Being ruthless about what I will and will not watch is not saying to the creators, “you are bad.” It is saying, “this is not to my taste.” It may seem short-sighted, but if a book doesn’t grab me, that is the answer. The answer is not to continue reading it until I regret it.

Some books I have more trouble with than others. It’s hard going to the Spy Museum and meeting the authors of the book you’re going to read when you get home, because of course now you have a signed copy. Picturing Jonna Mendez and Tracy Walder doing their jobs is important to me, but it’s also frightening. That is because if the books are tense, the real situations scared them. Full stop. You cannot put emotions into writing that you do not have.

I mean, you can, but it won’t sound as authentic as Mendez and Walder.

I’ve talked a lot about Jonna, let me pivot to Tracy. Tracy and I are kindred spirits, because I’m the only person outside of her family that she knows who has been diagnosed with hypotonia as a baby, the catchall for cerebral palsy in the late 1970s. Many CP kids were missed due to hypotonia being mostly a placeholder diagnosis that required more testing. So, we look at each other differently because we have that one specific thing in common….. floppy muscles.

Ellen Pompeo actually bought the rights to the book, “The Unexpected Spy,” but I don’t know what happened to the project after that. But honestly, that was part of the book talk. We talked about the fact that she’s from Dallas. She didn’t impress me because she had both CIA and FBI on her resume. She impressed me because she taught at Hockaday.

There’s such a bent toward intelligence in high-octane academics that it might as well be Teacher, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

(David, if you’ll allow me just this ONE joke. I promise.)

I call him David to avoid the special character in his pen name at all costs. You know, like that famous Youtuber and shame & vulnerability researcher, Dr. Brown.

Anything to avoid flipping into “View as HTML” just so I can code the entities.

Ok. I’ll do it one time.

Dr Brown is Brené Brown.
David is David Cornwell, or John Le Carré.

It is so much easier to type special characters on my phone than it is on my laptop. The things I do for my audience. 😉

David Cornwell is an excellent author, but I prefer his autobiography to his novels. And of everything I listen to “The Pigeon Tunnel,” the documentary about Cornwell, more than anything else because I just want to hear his voice. It’s soothing as I go to sleep.

Alternatively, I have all of his adapted BBC Radio Dramas for the car.

However, I am more interested in the writer than the character. Smiley is amazing, but he is no David Cornwell, although they’ve met. It is honestly how I feel about my writing. I’m not the same person I write about here because I cannot capture every thread in my brain at once. You learn fragments. So, the version of me that you know is the character. Some people never get beyond that, and from what I am learning, few people should.

Not everyone deserves access to me, and that’s okay. I cannot be everything to everyone because I’ve tried it. There’s no prize.

But the larger point to the title is that I don’t regret reading books because I don’t regret anything- not that I have never done anything worthy of regretting. I have done terrible things of which I am not proud, but regret says that you haven’t metabolized that hurt yet. I have metabolized the hurt inasmuch as I can. I am ready to move on to the next phase of my life, because there’s no such thing as going backwards. I am lost at being consumed as a product but not having the safety and security of people around me.

But don’t feel sorry for me- I alienated everyone myself. Old patterns were not working, and new ones didn’t take. But I was in the process of becoming something else, and now I know where I need to go.

It is being able to love myself enough not to want to lose me, either.