Feedback, Moving Forward, and Faith

I've been writing in this blog for close to three months now and there have been a few changes since then. For those who haven't noticed, my overall theme has changed a little. The reason is this. Somewhere around my junior year of high school I decided that my passion for reading was something that I might be able to turn into an ability to write. I didn't know where to start, so I just started to write down stories, poems, stray thoughts, anything that interested me. It soon became a habit and after all these years I tend to daydream more often than not, living in worlds in my mind created out of bits and pieces of things I pick up all around me. Well back then I didn't think I was good enough, nor did I ever think I would be. I threw away most of the things I wrote. I couldn't stand to read them, my perceived lack of ability always seemed obvious on every page I wrote. Honestly those things probably were bad but I remember bits and pieces that were, at the very least, good ideas. I should never have thrown them away but at the time I felt that if i couldn't read them then I couldn't let anyone else read them and so there was no point in holding on to them. So I trashed things.

Since then, year after year, I have constantly battled myself. I couldn't stop thinking about it so I wrote. I thought what I wrote was bad so I stopped. Then I started again. Still bad. Finally, after deciding that I could spend the rest of my life thinking I was terrible at the one thing that I have always had a desire to do, I decided to stop constantly beating myself down. After all, if there is only one thing you love to do, that you are passionate about, it shouldn't really matter how good you are. If you're not good enough, keep trying. If you don't see improvment, try it in a different way. Something that sits this deep inside you cannot simply be cast aside. So I'm done with quitting. I'm done with deciding I'm a bad writer. I can't handle giving it up so I'm done with telling myself I'll never succeed. The only way I'll turn this thing I do into something I can completely devote myself to is to keep doing it. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year. But I didn't get here alone.

Along the way there were many many people who told me to stop beating myself up. Every once in awhile I would fight myself hard enough to let a friend or family member read what I had written and I got some good feedback. They said they thought I was good. They thought I had talent. I had teachers that told me some of my work showed promise. Back then I brushed it off as biased. They were friends and family. They were being supportive. Only in my twisted little mental battle could I turn support into something that couldn't be true. I gave that up long ago too. My opinion is not the only one that matters and honestly, based on my self deprecating nature, should probably not be at the top of the list. At least not in this matter. Another realization that drove me to this point was constantly talking to, and hearing about, people that were doing things that they love. They love their careers. I've never had a job that I felt that way about. I couldn't imagine turning any of my jobs into a career and then at some point deciding I loved it. I was jealous. I started searching everywhere, anywhere, for the career that I loved. I never found it. Until, that is, I realized that I had found it long ago but never given myself enough credit to think that it could be a career. I thought of it as a hobby. Not even that, really. I think I always treated it like an addiction, something I couldn't stop but had to feed every now and then to keep it from driving me crazy. I denied it and I think, in the process, I was denying myself. I was actively making myself unhappy. It's a stupid thing to do, but I doubt if i'm the only one that's ever done it.

I spent years building all these walls around the thing I loved. No one was allowed to see. It was mine but I was convinced I didn't want it. I couldn't get rid of it so I hid it. Every time it found a crack to seep through I'd put up another wall. I knew all the statistics. The odds of getting published are small. The odds of making a living on it even smaller. I know there are thousands of writers spending years in seeming futility. They keep plugging on. For the longest time I wasn't even willing to try. At the very least this was an insult to them. I'm not really sure how, but I think it was. Maybe in some way I was saying that for me to attempt would be futile because I would never get published. Based on that decision I was basically saying that all those people struggling to achieve the thing that I had already given up were wasting their time. That's not nice. It's not true either. After all of that, all those years, there was one thing that really tipped the scales for me. It made me decide that it was all or nothing. One of the two people that I respect most in this world asked me to make a promise. I have broken promises before, but this is one that I intend to keep. I promised that no matter what I wrote, I would not beat myself up or talk badly about it or say anything about it being worthless in the process.

It seems like a small thing. Maybe when I made the promise I thought it was. As it turns out that one little promised knocked the keystone out of all the defenses that I'd piled up over the years. Of all the things I did over that period of time, I couldn't make myself stop writing. I have to do it. The main defense, the one that was holding everything else up, was deciding in advance that what I was doing was terrible. It probably made a lot of the things I wrote not fun to read all by itself. Now I don't allow myself to do that. If I don't have my little shield to hide behind then I have only two choices. Do it often and give it everything I have, or give it up completely. I tried to do the latter for a long time and I still don't know how. I'm not trying to do that anymore. I think I would lose a part of myself if I did figure it out. So now I must do the former. Suprisingly, it has seemed to let out the beast. I am no longer feeding an addiction to make it go away for awhile. I am embracing a passion that honestly just makes me happy in the doing of it. I care how it turns out, but that's not what this is about. Writing, for me, is about doing the one thing that feels, for the lack of a better word, honest. It is not what I do, it is who I am. That promise carried a lot of weight.

The point of all of this is to say that in the beginning this blog was a sort of game, it fed the addiction, it was entertaining, but it was not the best use for it. I like to talk about reality, but I need this forum to be about something else. This is why most of my recent entries have been abstract, and why they will continue in this vein. I am considering starting a new blog so that I can talk about things other than writing, but I think that this one will be devoted to the fiction in my head. The support of everyone who reads this blog has been very helpful in finally forcing myself to admit, to myself, that this is what I'm going to do. I have always been my own worst enemy but I'm finally trying to fight that tendency. So thanks to all of you for the feedback. It has meant more than you know whether it came on or off the blog. Maybe a few years from now I'll be thanking you in the beginning of a book. I'll let you know if you need to start looking for it on shelves.

So it all comes down to faith. No matter what you do, you have to believe that you can do it. Deciding you will fail before you start will cause you to fail before you start. It's cliche, but it's true. I've been doing it for almost ten years. If you know what you love to do then don't give up on it for something else whether you've got a talent for something else or not. If you have a talent for something but find no joy in it then don't pursue the talent just because you can. Instead, try to apply that talent in some way towards doing the thing you really love to do. Lifes to short to ignore what makes you happy. Within reason. Have faith in yourself. Only you can force yourself to really go after what you're looking for. No one will do it for you. These things are all easy to say, but you have to believe them too. I am finally to the point at which I do believe these things. I know what my career will be. I just have to develope myself well enough to make a living at it at the same time. There is no giving up. Have faith.