Oct. 30, 2001
I’ve been hearing from so many people who have come to this site and after reading have said to me, that they felt the exact same way I did when I was in corporate america and wanted to get out and also from artists who share the same struggles I’ve had on my creative path.
This has been a huge comfort. The stories I used to read of people were how they left their small home town with $20 in their pocket and the next thing you know, they had acheived their dream in a big way. You never heard about the inbetween, and that inbetween is so critical.
The first few months of all of this I questioned myself. I questioned my talent. I questioned my abilities. I questioned if the want was more than the substance. I wasn’t sure if I was kidding myself, that the blocks I was having were really blocks and not just lack of talent. I was overwhelmed, confused. I felt stupid. And I would have sworn that I was the only person that felt that way.
But I wasn’t, and I’m not.
Last night, Chris and I were talking. Just a little over a month ago he started his life long dream of learning the guitar. He’s got such a passion for music and creating and that’s all he wanted to do. Not for a job, but just because he loved it. So every week he’s been going to class and although he’s getting better, he’s not making the huge leaps he wants to.
He thinks maybe he’s too old, or that he just doesn’t have talent. He can hear what he wants to play but his fingers don’t know how to move the right way. He’s frustrated. “It’s only been a short time,” I said. “Maybe I’m kidding myself,” he said. “Maybe I’m blinding myself because I want it so bad I don’t stop to think that maybe there’s nothing there.”
“It’s there,” I said. “If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t mean so much to you and the frustration wouldn’t be so great.”
He looked at me and said, “I’d guess you’d know. You’ve already gone through this, haven’t you?”
I nodded. I think when you do something non-linear, or something that you’re passionate about that doesn’t have a set of rules to follow, you can get overwhelmed and frustrated so easily and quickly. But I think the thing to remember is that if it means so much to you, it will work out. Maybe not exactly as planned when you’re sitting in a cubicle or in a perfect dream-like way that you once read about in a book.
But it will happen to you because life happens and you can choose the path to follow and the dream to make real.
Oct. 27, 2001
If I wait for things to calm down a bit so that I can catch my breath, I realise that I will be waiting quite some time. Life doesn’t stop for anyone, especially for me and especially right now.
That’s not a negative thing however. I’m currently riding an energy and creative high and I feel like I’ve got to just go with it for fear of losing all the momentum. After all the months of the ups and downs I have realised that a creative life is just that. One minute you’ll be creating like a mad man and the next you’ll be wallowing in self pity, complaining how you have not even one brilliant or creative idea at all. It’s a cycle, it’s life.
So now I am working on a million different ideas and trying hard to focus in on just a couple. I think that’s a problem with creativity is that when you’re on such a high, your mind works overtime and brain begins to create so many ideas. So many that it is almost impossible to do them all. That can lead to a bad situation if you’re not careful because you don’t want to start to think that you’re not doing all that you could do, or that every idea is on the same level of importance. For me, I’ve had to learn how to weed through them all and to learn how to decide what I can do now, what I can do later, and what I won’t be able to do at all.
I think that kind of thinking is vital especially when there are so many options and ideas floating around in your brain. Focus and attention are critical and unfortunately, they are also my weak areas. Aren’t free sprits meant to be free and not contemplating using a palm pilot?
But I realise for my sanity, for the work, for actually getting paid, that I have to organise, focus and create.
Therefor, I’ve decided I need to write my goals for the next couple of months. I’m debating at this point if I should have a deadline or daily goals or word count. Maybe that will feel like pressure so perhaps I’ll wade into this slowly and just write them down first.
So, my goals over the next month are as follows:
- Really make some headway on my portfolio – including showcasing my published works, unpublished works, photography, and art.
- To rework my travel writings and get the travel site up and running.
- Start my other site which will be a component of girlatplay.com which will feature other women like myself and spread the word that living a dream really is possible.
- And last but not least, continue to work on my magazine articles and hopefully make my first sale.
That’s not a small plate I realise. And perhaps I’m being overly ambitious. Time will tell. The strange thing about this, is that for the first time I’m not afraid to begin. I actually feel ready.
Oct. 25, 2001
From April to September I had enjoyed perfect health. I was wide eyed and bushy tailed. I giggled, I smiled, I contemplated, I was quiet, I was content, I was happy – all this despite small bouts of worry, confusion and frustration. Living as I wanted, as a writer, made me feel true to who I was and somehow, this kept me well.
But the last few I had begun to feel quite ill – almost like I had back in April before I realised I needed to quit my job. I was tired, rundown, and my throat was sore. I coughed, I sneezed, I ached. I was mentally fogged in. I was slow. I was doing less than I had as a full time writer yet I had less energy.
What had changed was that a couple of weeks ago, I had taken on a job two days a week at a local spa. I had done this because it was a place I went to and they asked me if I’d like to work the front. I thought this might be a good idea to get me out of the house as I was going a bit stir crazy and also a good way to get a massage. Yet, it turned out for me to be a bad decision; I didn’t enjoy it, the atmosphere was bitchy, the work wasn’t anything remotely interesting and the free massages necer came.
The days I’d go to that job people would tell me that I didn’t look well – my eyes showed it. My heart, felt it. Maybe I was coming down with something, I thought. The problem is I never got full blown sick, I just had these small symptoms everywhere.
So only after a couple of weeks, I quit. Since then, something quite amazing has happened.
I’ve been feeling fantastic. This despite nothing but cold weather, hard rain, and terribly foggy nights. I’ve felt alive and energetic. I’ve been on a whirlwind of creative work, bundling ideas, reading, playing, learning, and basically just doing things that pertain to my passion of writing and art.
My diet hadn’t changed, I hadn’t taken any medicine, the weather certainly wasn’t in my favour, but I was no longer sick. I was no longer in the mode of coming down with something.
I didn’t really make the connection until I read a passage in the book, If you want to Write from 1938. In it, the author Brenda Ueland wrote this about her friend:
I know of a very great woman who makes her living by teaching violin lessons in the daytime… Then from midnight until five o’clock in the morning, she is happy because she can work on her book… The book is her life work….
…”One day she came to me and had a very bad cold. “Oh, lie down quick! I exclaimed, “and I will get you some hot lemonade and put a shawl over yourself.”
She opened her eyes wide at me, and said almost with horror in her voice.
“Oh, that is no way to treat a cold!… No, I slumped a little yesterday and so I caught it. But I worked all night and it is much, much better now.”
The point of that passage is that when you put your energy into what you love to do, your body reacts, sort of a mind over matter type of thing. You are happy, you are content, the energy feeds your body, you heal. When you do something you don’t like to do, you have those aches and pains that have no name and are only cured by stopping the work that you hate.
Although I have been frustrated and almost angry with myself for taking up temporary office job work (despite the fact I had good intentions. 1. To keep me around others and keep me social 2. To help me save for an ibook for my writing) it really taught me a lesson. That is, that I am nothing more than a writer and I can’t pretend to be anything else, no matter how small the scale of pretending might seem. And that if I do what I love to do, I am alive and there is no exception whatsoever.
Writing might bring me confusion, fear, a sense of being overwhelmed, perhaps disappointment but it never makes me ill, it never makes me sad and it never makes me feel less than. It just makes me feel real.
Oct. 22, 2001
Being a writer, being in control and doing what I love to do, I have weathered far less failures than life in the Corporate World.
Before I used to have jobs I failed at, job relationships I failed at, daily tasks I failed at. I wasn’t going up the ladder fast enough, I wasn’t getting something done fast enough, I wasn’t building my career fast enough. I felt like everyday I was drowning and failing.
However, now I don’t have that. Now what I have instead are things that “just didn’t work out.”
If I write an article that wasn’t the best or didn’t get accepted, I don’t see that as failure – it just didn’t work out. If I tried to do a painting and it came out really horrible, I don’t consider it a failure – it just didn’t work out. If I thought I’d do A,B,C today but instead I did X,Y, & Z I didn’t fail – my original plan just didn’t work out.
Now, I don’t have timelines with regards to where I need to be in my career. If I just wanted to write magazine articles for 10 years, there is no failure there. If I were in the Corporate World and in the same position for that long without title changes and promotions, I’d be seen as a failure. If at some point I don’t want to write full time, but instead teach art and do public speaking on living your dream, it didn’t mean that I failed at writing, but now I’m just doing something else. If at some point I feel that art isn’t where I need to be and I drop it, it doesn’t mean that I failed at it and my time learning about it was a waste, it just meant that I’m going to try a new direction.
If I skipped around that much in the Corporate World I’d be seen as a flighty failure and someone you shouldn’t hire because I would be unstable. I see it as being creative and trying so many things – some of which I love and some of which just didn’t work out.
I think that transformation of thinking has been one of the most subtly wonderful things that’s happened so far. It’s been extremely empowering. I have a power now that I didn’t have when I was in the Corporate World.
Even when I first started this, I didn’t have that power because I was very afraid of failing. The fear of failing hung very heavy on me because it had been so ingrained into my head that if you didn’t do things a certain way, for certain people and at certain times, you were, in fact, a failure. And instead of remembering and being proud of the 17 things I had accomplished in a day, it would always be the one failure I would remember. And that one failure would have more power than anything else.
But now I realise what failure really is and that you can only fail in one of two ways. One is by either not trying. And two is by comparing yourself to others.
I’m trying my arse off here and I’m not comparing. There is no comparing. All I can do is what I need to do. How can one ever fail at that?
Oct. 15, 2001
October 09th was my deadline to rewrite and submit an article I had written over two months ago to my editor. I sat up late that night trying to combine two different articles into one, and rewrite it to make it better. Somewhere around midnight I lost enthusiasm and clarity and just ended up giving up.
I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep going and I thought about submitting the article late, but I thought that might be worse, especially since I had a couple of weeks to do it. Instead I turned in an article that I felt wasn’t the best I could do and waited to hear back from my editor.
I waited to hear the criticism, the “you should do this,” or “I liked this version better” or “I thought you were a writer” or “On second thought, we can’t use this.” But I didn’t hear anything from her; there was nothing but silence.
The silence started to make me uneasy and got me to thinking that she was probably thinking the same thing that I was – that I could have done better. The past couple of days I actually thought about writing her to tell her that I was sorry and if she wants I’ll rewrite it again. Actually, what I wanted to tell her was that I was embarrassed.
However tonight she emailed me and said: “Great job! I’m impressed at your story-combining capabilities. Seamless! I don’t have any further changes to request. Thanks for such a thoughtful rewrite!”
I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Was it sincere? Was it true? Did I write something wonderful or did she just have deadlines to meet too?
I went to Chris and told him that I felt odd for receiving a compliment on something I wasn’t entirely sure was good. He said that sometimes we are too self-critical, especially if we’re criticising something we’re passionate about. He also told me because I’ve never taken a writing course or went to college to study writing that maybe that I don’t know how to judge things very well. He said that perhaps I was just good at writing and others recognised that and that maybe I should too.
His comforting should have made me feel better but it didn’t. I knew what he was saying wasn’t the reason I was feeling odd about what I’d written
I handed the article to Chris and asked him to read it and give me honest feedback.
“It’s good,” he said rather nonchalantly.
“I think I’ve written better journal entries than that,” I said.
“Yeah maybe.”
“I think it lacks passion or inspiration. It doesn’t seem to speak to me, it’s just kind of there, kind of just written for the sake of it. It doesn’t ring true for me.” As soon as I said that, I realised that that was what was really bothering me – the fact it didn’t ring true.
It had rung true a couple of months ago, but the rewrite just sort of sucked out any realness and passion I had in it. The article became rewritten because someone told me to and not because I had something more to add. I realise that I had taken the point of view that the rewrite was now “work” and “effort” instead of “here is a chance to make it all work and make it wonderful.”
Since that was my first experience with an editor and with rewriting, I didn’t really have any idea on how to do it or react to it. I just went about it in the only way I thought of at the time which was to just work at it from an intellectual, cold kind of way. I know now that for me that’s the wrong way to go about it.
Now when I have to do rewrites what I really have to do is try to maintain the truth and intention that I wrote with in the beginning. I have to keep it real to me and keep it alive. Even if the editor wants it all changed from here to kindgdomcome and has one million corrections, I have to somehow try to maintain some of the passion that inspired the article in the first place, or else I just won’t be satisfied and the article will show it.
That’s going to be really hard but important to do. One thing I’ve read over is that is has to ring true for the writer. If it doesn’t, the reader will know.
I’m still not sure what to make of having the article that I just rewrote potentially going out into published land without me being really satisfied with it. Perhaps I just have to chalk it up to learning and move onto the next writing piece.
Maybe that’s all I can do at this point.