Tag Archives: hope

Screw the Circumstances!

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The circumstance dictates that my life should be a failure.

No, wait, I’m not done.

I am 36. Divorced. I have three teenagers. I work a low paying, dead end job with no opportunities for advancement. Two years of college but no degree. Very little job experience. And I’m broken from years of abuse.

Circumstances dictate that I should be a failure. Never get anywhere, never accomplish anything, and die alone. The little old lady with a house full of cats. (Sorry, apartment, I make too little to get a house.) Too many kids, and too much baggage for any sane person to take a chance on.

Well, screw the circumstances!

Your life, and your situation do not dictate who you are, or where you are going, unless you let them. We are not the sum of the experiences we are dealt, rather we are the sum of how we deal with those circumstances.

There have been men who hiked to the top of everest despite not having feet. Women who made families, and raised children despite lack of legs. People who won contest, performed great feats of strength, painted, sculpted, created, and THRIVED despite the circumstances of their life.

What’s your excuse?

I have a lot of circumstances, but they don’t define me. I am using my time, energy, and passion to pursue the one thing that I have always loved, and always wanted to do.
I write.

I am turning my circumstances into useful things. Using the past, the baggage, and the brokenness, as springboards for stories. Using my job as time to think through plots while I sweep floors. Enjoying my family, and building a new life.

Life isn’t always easy. But the truth is… the trees that are sheltered, that never stand up to the winds… those are the weakest trees in the forest.

Don’t let circumstances get you down. Use them. Grow. Stand firm against the wind. Lean on friends and family if you need to, and prune away the rough bits. But above all else, don’t let the circumstances dictate your life.

Brains are weird

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Imagine a person standing against a board. On the other side of the board is another person. As long as they both push against that board it doesn’t move.

The one on the nearside is just trying to hold the wall up. All they care about is keeping the normality at a steady level. Keep the wall strait. Hold on. Steady.

The guy on the other side of the wall… he’s an asshole. He keeps pushing on that wall. Pressing in, trying to demolish the house the first person made.

Sometime the ass gets tired, and he wanders away. Bored. Other times he pushes harder, or enlists help. Some days…. some days he has a tractor and he manages to knock the wall down.

The girl inside… she just wants to build her house. So she picks up the pieces and puts it back together, and guards the wall. Hoping to keep it up. Hoping to keep it steady the next time he attacks.

After a while she doesn’t leave the wall anymore. And when he stops pounding on the walls she gets nervous. Constantly waiting for the next blow.

The blows become normal. They become natural. They become her world.

So when you take down the wall and set her free… it’s so hard to just be normal.

And then something good happens. Someone actually pays attention, or god forbid, helps her build that wall. It’s shocking, even terrifying, because it isn’t normal. Not to her. Not to the life she’s lived for so many years, trapped inside those walls.

I realize these things. I know my brain is lying to me when a good thing happens and I start waiting for something horrible to happen. Nothing horrible has really happened in the last four years…

Like the Blogess says… Depression is a lying bastard.

Being called out

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I’ve been trying to surround myself with people who believe in me, and who push me to do… better… to do things I am not comfortable with.

Alright, lets be a bit honest. I think I have a touch of social anxiety disorder. No, I haven’t been diagnosed, and I don’t think I have the full onset disorder. I just know that sometimes I have to retreat from everything, and everyone, and hide in a little space where I slowly breath and cry, and try so hard to forget there is anything outside my little head. Try to find a place that is safe, and secure. One where the world isn’t closing in on me.

I do this as a self preservation technique. I actually started it when I was in my teens, and during my marriage it got worse. Since my divorce it doesn’t happen very often, but when it does happen the moments can be almost more overwhelming. I think because it use to be a constant stress that I was holding my walls up against  and now that the stress is gone I have let most of the walls down, so when a sudden stress happens it gets closer to me. Closer to my core, and my identity. It hurts much more and I have a bit of a freak out. But I also recover a lot quicker then I use to.

So that brings me to today, and The Story Telling Podcast. Sigh, and YAY at the same time.

Okay, I really like Garrett, and I consider him a friend. An internet friend, to be sure, but a friend. He’s read one of my stories, given me a nice review, and said “KEEP WRITING” often. That means a lot to me. Oh, and he’s actually laughed at my jokes, which doesn’t happen much.

So today… Garrett asks for people to call in and leave voicemail, and he CALLS ME OUT! Okay, so I watch every episode. I tweet them during the show. I comment, etc. etc. I suppose I deserved it, but…

No one knows this. I’ve been trying to get the nerve up to do some audio recording. I’d like to record one of my own stories, or just a little mini podcast on my blog here. But every time I pull up the recorder I look down at the glowing red button… and… freeze… It scares the hell out of me.

I am so afraid of sounding like an idiot. With type I can change the words, rewrite, edit, and adjust things for a while, and then release it to the world. With audio it starts with the fact that I absolutely hate my voice, and ends with the fact that I can’t think of words when I am speaking. They just suddenly fly away into the surrounding air, unwilling to land upon my tongue. I have no idea why I don’t have that problem while typing, but with speaking… it’s a HUGE problem.

But, on this journey that is my life I am trying to improve myself. I am trying to do things that make me uncomfortable and doing more. Doing things to get where I want to go.

So yes, Garrett, I will send you a comment or question. I will be your “bathtub girl”, lol. I will be scared, but I’ll do it anyway… Because I can.

Progress and Setbacks

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I’ve made a huge leap forward. I am in the habit of writing again, and I honestly feel uncomfortable, and distracted if I haven’t written for a day. I skipped two days of writing last week because family life got in the way and I went to bed kind of upset with myself. Ended up writing even more the next project day and still felt like it wasn’t enough. I still wanted to write, and wanted my body and my schedule let me.

So, on the plus side, I have my neurosis back… the inability to put down a pen, and an insatiable desire to tell a story. In my case a computer and phone. I am now almost always thinking of things I can write. “Osiren’s Tears” is coming along nicely, and the next project, “Star Crossed” is a really interesting SF/romance that I am actually looking forward to writing (and refusing to let myself till ‘Osiren’ is done.)

So what’s the set back?

Since I have decided to make a concerted effort to publish, and be an author, not just a writer, I am having to deal with some other issues of my insecurities.

Writing itself, putting words on the page, was always easy for me. Words came, stories flowed, and I loved it. The reason I stopped writing all those years ago had absolutely nothing to do with the words. The words, and the stories, were still there. It had far more to do with acceptance.

I had several articles, short stories, and poems published in some magazines and e-zines a few years ago, but I never got paid for any of them even though the contract said I would. It was incredibly frustrating, and all the nice words from their fans, and even an award, wasn’t enough to make up for the fact that they never bothered to pay me. Wasn’t I worth the few dollars they promised me for all my hard work?

Couple this with my personal life…

I have found talking about some of the things from my past to be cathartic. Sometimes I’ll hear from others who lived through similar things. Sometimes I’ll just get some kind words. Other times it just feels good to get it off my chest.

So… I was told often, and repeatedly, for years, that I would never amount to anything. That no one would ever love me. That everyone who even talked to me just wanted to use me. They didn’t care about me, didn’t care what I did, what I said, or what I thought. And I was often put in situations that reinforced those ideas.

So now when I look at that brand new shiny microphone I just bought and say to myself “I could just say hello to people”… Some quiet part of my soul screams from the shadows “No! Don’t humiliate yourself like that!”

That voice wins far too often for my comfort.

Here is the gist…
I’m scared.
I’m terrified!

Every time I finish a book I look for reasons not to publish it because then I don’t have to get bad reviews. I don’t have to feel rejected. Or hurt. Or afraid. Worrying that no one will ever buy it, ever read it, or ever care what I have to say.

It is hard to divorce yourself from the work, let it go, and say… do your worst!

The Leftover Pieces

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I don’t have much from my past. I had three life changing moments where I was left with only a box of things, and everything else had to be donated, trashed or sold, so only the few things that meant a great deal to me managed to make it to my home now.

 

But I’ve always thought those things, those precious memoires you choose to keep even when the world is collapsing down around you, those are what define you. They are what show what really matters to you.

Of all the “things” that survived the upheaval in my life, being homeless, a failed marriage, moving to four different states, and crossing thousands of miles of land with just a little suitcase to my name, the only thing that truly survived all of that was my writing.

I have the paper I stole from school, stapled together, and wrote in bright orange marker about a nymph in a forest. I have the poems I typed up on an old typewriter, stapled together, and marked with “1cent” up in the corner. I have the first school assignment that asked for a story about a picture. Some of these are 20+ years old, and I have them all.

In fact, over the last 30 years of writing I have lost only one thing (that I know of). Half of the very first novel I ever completed. Called “Deaths Gate”, it was about a girl who was unable to ever get close to anyone because Death marked her as his bride and would kill anyone who tried to claim her as his.

The novel took five years to put together. I started it in my Junior year of high school, and continued on through the first few years of my marriage. We moved around a lot. Had children. Got our first PC. Had to put all the hand written notes into the PC for the first time.

It took five years of a sentence here and there to get through the 200 page manuscript. It had elves, hunters, battles, nymphs, magic, and one lost young woman who simply wanted to claim her life as her own. It was terrible. Poorly written, and full of Mary Sue’s. But I finished it.

Then my computer crashed and took it with it. All of my hard work just gone. Lost. Unrecoverable.

I did find half of it in a drawer somewhere, the last half, and I still have it. No one else will ever read it, but it will follow me to every home I move to from here on out.

When I took some college classes I tried figuring out “what do you want to be when you grow up?” for the first time since my divorce and having my life in my own hands. I looked back n those leftover pieces and started to think about what was important. What made me “ME”.

What do you have as leftover pieces?