My Manifesto Against Being a Chickenshit

Stepping into 2025

Photo by Egor Myznik on Unsplash

NOTE: This article is republished as an appropriate start to 2025. Happy New Year!

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All my life, I’ve been a chickenshit. I’m neither proud of it nor dismayed by it. It is simply a fact. I have always wanted to be a writer and a poet, but I was too scared to put the real truth about myself out there. Oh sure, there is a poem here and there. There’s been a couple of essays. But rather than going all in, I bailed out. Became a businessman. Built an income. Then, felt the need to protect that income. I kept writing in my journals, and even produced some books. In fact, I even published them. But I could not promote them effectively. I was too sacred. I could lose my business, my income. My family would hurt for it. Rather than moving into my truth, I sold out for income.

At 62 years old, I am writing this now to say: Stop! It is over. There is nothing left to protect. I am finding the fully integrated me; the whole self. In whatever time I have left in this life, and it could be thirty seconds or thirty years, I am going to live the full truth of my being to the very best that I can. No more chickenshit… well, except for the garden. I need chickenshit for the garden. But that’s different.

Maybe all writers struggle with this. Maybe not. So much coaching on being an author today talks about publishing books to get consulting gigs, or creating a laser-focused brand in a niche, or focusing on how to use social media to market yourself. But for me, none of those could get me over the key hurdle—believing in myself and the willingness to say the truth and be fully honest about my knowledge, my opinions, my art, and my love. Indeed, I hid a lot. I could be one persona in the corporate world and another in the poetry world. I could be one persona while sailing, and yet another as a business mentor and teacher. I could be outspoken in a group leaning liberal about the evils of right wing extremism, and moderate into a feigned agreement with conservatives in a conversation. I was expert at one thing: I was a chameleon. I could blend into the social milieu, almost whatever it was. Blend in and live my own falseness.

Nowhere did this have a worse effect than in my relationships. It served my fear of abandonment to blend in to whatever my wife wanted, and after she died, to whatever the new women in my life wanted. Or at least, to what I thought they wanted. I see now that in reality, I was living a deception, for that’s what it is to always please others. You don’t stand up for yourself. You present as something else, and eventually, you actually become something else. Indeed, that’s how I rolled. I became something else.

I started unraveling this experience a few years ago. Probably the biggest step came last year when I ended a relationship in which I could not find my true self. I knew in my heart that I had to find it, and I knew that despite my strong feelings for my partner, I could not hold my own integrity while in that relationship. It was a sad but necessary move for my soul.

Since then, my writing has flourished, but it is backing up against this same inner resistance to publishing. Fear, self protection, the story of protecting others… all of it is still there. I have three manuscripts done, but am frozen on publishing them. The same patterns of thought, the same fears, and the same inactions have me frozen. They are all there. I still wasn’t aware of them, and they kept me bound up and, from a publishing standpoint, silent. I will be silent no more.

Last night, in conversation with my writing friend Roger, I realized that I have only one choice—to find, be, and present my full true self, grounded in the truth of my story and my life, all in one being. From there will come my work on climate change and my poetry, my writing on postcapitalism and my writing on grief, my experience in business and my writing for men. And, of course, when love strikes, I will write that, too.

I consider this a short manifesto against being chickenshit. I am declaring a lot here. I hope my friends and readers will hold me accountable to it. The future of my writing promises to be far more lively, challenging and interesting.

Anthony Signorelli