The shrill electronic version of a rooster crowing invaded my slumber. With barely an eye open I silenced it and moaned. I’m still tired. I need more sleep.
There’s a writing seminar online I want to take advantage of. I have to schedule that 90 minutes into my day. So at 11:30 my day officially begins.
Now I can hear some of you out there saying “11:30? What’s SHE complaining about?” Let me explain: Writing is not what pays my electric bill or my mortgage. I also work an eleven hour shift four nights a week at a factory that tempers glass for windows and doors. I generally get to bed between 7 and 8 in the morning. Ah… now I can feel the nodding heads as you begin to see the picture.
Writing is my life blood. The act of writing has been my escape all my life. I should have tried to make a career of it. I didn’t. I was too afraid of rejection and failure. Too often growing up I was told I wasn’t good enough. If the people who knew me my whole life couldn’t be satisfied with my work and who I am, why would I think an entire world of strangers would want to read my writings and hear my thoughts?
It didn’t stop me from writing. It just stopped me from sharing my writing. I still wrote poems about broken hearts and unrequited love. I wrote about nature. I wrote out my feelings and my hurts and my joys. I about about life, the same life problems and trials that everyone else experiences in their own lives. I just didn’t share. It. It couldn’t be good enough.
For twenty years after becoming an adult I stumbled through life, unfocused, without goals. I did what I had to do to keep the bills paid. It has been very unsatisfying, but I didn’t know how to do anything different. I was responsible enough to pay the bills. I was too scared to do it with words. So I worked my hours at my night job, writing page after page of words I was afraid to let anyone see.
In the last ten years I have been working on my self-esteem issues. I have read books about stifling my inner critic. But he’s very loud and persuasive. He had thirty years to break me down. It took more than reading a book to recover from his damage.
But it was the beginning of the journey. A book simply called “Self-Esteem” by Patrick Fanning and Matthew McKay changed my life. Somehow I had recognized that my self-esteem was gone and I found this book. There were many other books on self-esteem at Barnes and Noble, but this one seemed to jump out at me. It opened my eyes to a world inside of me I wasn’t aware of.
I learned about my inner critic. I learned that the word “SHOULD” controlled my life more than it needed to. I learned that it was OK to be me. That I was just as good as everyone else I meet. I realized I am my own worst critic.
Fast forward to today. I’ve begun this blog. I’m risking failure and rejection and putting my words out there. I’m beginning to gain more confidence in me. There will still be disappointments and rejections. I will deal with them as they come. But … every post here is a victory for me. It’s a way to thumb my nose at all those who would make me believe I’m not good enough. Including myself.
So today, at 11:30, despite my fatigue from the night shift, I am excited to be writing and publishing posts. If missing a couple hours of sleep gets me on the track to where I want to be, where I feel I belong, then those couple hours are easily sacrificed. Today I can say, I am a writer.
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