My life long dream from as young as I can remember was to write a book of fiction. Not just any book, a best seller, something that would graze the book store windows for weeks on end. My first book, my only book, was written in elementary school and featured a mouse and some stolen cheese. Author, illustrator, editor, I was very proud of my creation and even more so to “publish” it to my parents and sister, a kids most important audience. Through the years thereafter I developed stronger words, wrote some poems, editorials on life, and even a short story my high school history teacher never stopped praising me for. But then I slowly lost grasp of my dream. Time became sparser, life became busy, excuses more abundant. My dreams and needs were channeled into the dreams and needs of others and now I have a series of half started novels surrounding me, covered in dust bunnies.
The more I try, the more time I’m given, the less I get up and grab the reins to get back on the horse and until today I never quite figured out why.
At first I blamed a fear of rejection. Who in their right mind wants to hear that the thing they love the most and yearn to do most every minute of every day is garbage? But then I started blogging, publicly blogging, and learned that isn’t quite the problem. Every day I have a new follower, another like, so while rejection is still out there, it’s no longer making me cower in the corner.
My next resolve was that the more I write, the more I release my heart and true self into society’s hands. Being a very private person when it comes to certain parts of my life (contrary to what my facebook friends might think), this isn’t in my nature. Sure, I’m fine telling the world about the hilariousness of my kids, the moments of my life that make me say “WAAAAA????” either in hilarity or anger. But when it comes to the deep stuff, the stuff that makes me tick, I lock it up and fight battles behind closed doors. Hence, when the emotions start pouring, the easier to quit. Though I firmly believe this area adds a good amount of weight to the problem, it is not the center, nor the majority.
The problem, I’ve reconciled, is that I’ve become too stuck within myself. In all of the semi novel ideas that fill my mind, all the half written pages that stock my shelf, not one book is void of an event I’VE personally experienced, or a person that hasn’t played a huge role in my life, positive or negative. It’s all about me. How can one hope to look outside themselves to create something new when completely caught up in their past life? Don’t get me wrong, I could probably write close to ten novels on the things I’ve encountered in the last year alone, all very interesting. But none of it fiction, none of it taking me creatively beyond my wildest imagination, none of it fulfilling my dream.
Writing is an outlet, yes. It is a healthy way for me to scream, to cry, to laugh, to relive some of the best moments I’ve ever had and discard the worst. But it has the potential to be so much more, too. By staying “stuck” in these “moments, by not releasing myself of the pain that most of my past entails, I can’t dream or hope to experience my future or live my dream. The unknown will always be just that unless I allow myself to venture out of the old and into the new. These windows of emotions I keep at bay and happenings I have lived through, they shouldn’t be the catalyst to push my writing into a better place. While it’s certainly not unheard of to utilize life’s fortune and misfortune to create bestsellers, the drive should be the wonderment of unleashing the beautiful mind….the excitement of charting untraveled lands, experiencing new places and situations only imagination can build, creating amazing new characters, with all of the traits I long to possess or admire in others. To conquer the beauty of something new, I need to lay down the baggage of the old and the toxic, get OUT of my head, AWAY from my life, and dream up a new one.
Life according to Longnote . . . 