June 08, 2001
When I first started to write on the website, I wrote with enthusiasm and excitement. I felt I was moving forward. However, over the last few days I’ve been dreading having to report anything.
I feel like I just keep writing the same things over and over, or I’m up one day and completely flustered the next. I feel like if I don’t write some amazing accomplishment down, everyone will find out that in fact I should have remained in the office. My insecurities, my fears, and my lack of progress, my worry on how many times I’ve used the word “overwhelmed” have made me feel very small in terms of writing.
I’ve made such an open and honest declaration of living out a dream that I feel so responsible to do that now. Not just for me but for others who are afraid in some small way too. I want to prove that when your heart calls you, you have to listen. But how can I show that when I’m just as scared as anyone else?
I am starting from scratch here. For the past twenty years I have lived so linear and worked so hard to bury any creative feelings. Creativity was always seen as unproductive and selfish and so I shed away from it and have, in some regards, forgotten how to loosen up artistically. I don’t have any author friends, so I’m not sure how they write or what feelings they have and if mine are normal. I don’t know the process of writing, and so I’m unsure if I’m going about it right or wrong, or if there is such a thing.
Also I feel unproductive. At an office I could see the pay off of my work; collated copies, phone messages, emails returned, stacks of paper work completed and a very nice paycheque every two weeks. But with writing, how do you know? Is the only way to know that you’ve done something is to publish something? If it is, I’m in trouble.
When I met SARK the other night, I took that as some kind of sign that I was going in the right direction. After awhile I started to doubt it. I started to think what if she is kind to everyone like that, what if it was just polite talk, what if she was sincere and thinks I have potential, yet I don’t have anything to show. The more I thought about that event, the more I started to sink into negative feelings. I became less productive over the last few days. I think I was paralyzed by fear and self doubt.
I started to want some kind of concrete evidence, some kind of proof, that writing is what I should be doing. Instead of just believing it is, instead of just recognizing the feeling I get when I’m writing from my head to my toes, I wanted some kind of validation that I hadn’t made a mistake by quitting my corporate job. Of course, that’s silly, I thought. You don’t get proof just like that.
So this morning instead of writing, I decided to look at my website statistics page to see how people are finding me. I saw a link that I hadn’t seen before and so I clicked on it and it took me to a website that had nothing to do with my website at all. In fact, it was a horoscope site with a reading for Aquarius’s, which I am. I almost never read horoscopes because they’re just usually a lot of made up talk. Yet for some reason I ended up reading that one and it said:
Talk about a kick in the ass. As silly as it may seem it was the motivation that I needed. It has given me a little hope that all these emotions and fears that I have can be made useful.
I’ll keep working, I’ll keep typing or manually writing. I’ll continue to work on my mock up book and submit things to magazines. I’ll try to remember that right now, I need to go for progress and not perfection. That perhaps I can’t control the outcome or the when and where, but I can control the effort. And I will make one hell of an effort, because I believe in all of this.