Tag: writers

300 Posts and Counting

My 300th post in a row today. Only 65 more to go to reach my goal of writing a daily blog post for a full year.

Starting out on March 14th of last year (2023 for any of you who are just shaking off the trauma of whatever last year was), I wondered what the year would bring when I started out. I wondered if my goal of writing a book would be enhanced by this discipline. I wondered what I would learn about life. I wondered what I would learn about myself.

I’ve learned a few things. Among them, I have valued the feedback and support of fellow travelers. People in my life who may have only known me superficially before have stuck with me. They’ve read my posts, liked them and made valuable comments. I am grateful for you Diane and Gary. And Katie, too.

I have connected with other blog authors who are doing their bit to share their voice and insights with the world. Eclectic and interesting.

I’ve gleaned a few faithful readers and commentators along the way. I’ve signed up for their blogs and have learned from and enjoyed their writing. Thank you, Frank and Tony and Patti and Mangus and Kris. I see you too, ThatScaredLittleGirl. If I’ve missed any other regulars, please forgive me.

In the past, I have both applauded and decried the onslaught of technology and the power it has over most of us today. I’m just waiting for the internet to crash one day to see what kind of blind panic that triggers across the world. I don’t really wish that to happen, but admit I find it a fascinating prospect to contemplate.

I have discovered the memoir I originally set out to write is not as compelling a goal for me as it once was. I believe I was driven by a need to be validated and to share my learnings and survival strategies from the challenges of my childhood. How I overcame those challenges might be of help to others facing the same situations, I believed.

Part of me still believes that. Yet my life has evolved from a “survivalist” mindset and into a place of stability and contentment. I don’t have the same fire in my belly as I once had to share the atrocities I suffered in my childhood with the world. My solutions of choice come out in my blog writing practice anyway.

My deep-seated beliefs in spirituality over religion, self-care, meditation, yoga, healthy eating all inform my daily writing. Love over hatred. Kindness and compassion as a starting point for any new connections with others. When others disappoint or hurt me, I simply withdraw. I now believe it is their loss as much as mine for what we might have co-created together.

Like a wise farmer, I need to choose where I sow my seeds and try to pick fertile and welcoming soil. I spent too many years not doing that and have the results (or lack thereof) to prove it. I quote the wisdom of the late Maya Angelou who said: “When people show you who they are, believe them … the first time.”

That is such an important and hard-won lesson. My late mother destroyed her life by ignoring this truth. When she met my father, he was a firmly established drunkard and womanizer with a hair trigger temper. My mother believed that her love would change him. If it were not so sad and the consequences so tragic, I would laugh at that presumption.

Her misguided belief underscores a fundamental learning we all eventually come to. We can’t change anyone. It is difficult enough to change ourselves. Any of you who have successfully quit drinking, smoking, overspending, procrastination or other self-sabotaging behaviors know that truth intimately.

I have learned the hard lesson that you cannot push a string. People are as they are as you meet them in the present moment. What you hope and dream they will become one day, may or may not happen. Deal with them in the present, not in the someday you imagine.

If the present person you encounter proves to be a bad fit with where you are in your evolution, the only solution may be to walk away. You may wish them love and healing.

You do not have to expose yourself to the threat of being pulled under or back into the undertow of their unsettled and unresolved issues. That’s their job, not yours.

That was a tough learning for me. We are all tightly sewed into fraught expectations around family and friend relationships. Abandoning them may be seen and felt as disinterest or cruelty.

In my life, I have made those choices as an action of self-care and, yes, an act of love. It is often only in solitude and isolation that people learn the lessons they need to learn in their life.

Like people we lose through death, they are not gone from us. They are simply elsewhere.

I have learned lots over these past 300 days. I have much more to learn. I will always have much more to learn. It is an immutable truth that the more we know, the less we know we know.

I’m closing in on the final leg of this one year marathon. At the moment, I have no idea whatsoever what I will do on the 366th day. Carry on with daily posts or change direction? I do know this for sure.

Writing is not just a vocation but an avocation. It is an exercise in exploring the depths of the soul and spirit as much as it is a tangible product that others can ingest and ponder. It has given structure to my days, even when some of those days were very rocky and unpredictable.

I am finding my voice. I know her better now. I feel there is still much more to learn. So we’ll see. As we used to say regularly in the news business, the outcome “remains to be seen.” At any rate, you can safely assume there will be one even if I don’t yet know what that will be.

The Road Less Travelled

Right this minute, there is an eighty-something-year-old couple making love in their shared bed. Or maybe on their kitchen floor. They are both worried about how they are going to get up. But at this very minute, neither one of them cares.

There is an artist out there – maybe many. S/he is looking intently at the canvas in front of him/her deciding which direction to go in next. This shade of blue-green for those trees in the background. Or a shade or two lighter. A cup of coffee s/he made hours ago is sitting on the table in the art studio. Ice cold.

A writer is looking through a thesaurus yet again for the mot juste to capture and describe that scene of agony, bliss, confusion, or wonder. The writer is looking at that blank page in front of him/her straining to put down on paper what their heart sees and most deeply wants to express. It is a marathon, not a sprint.

These are the lucky ones. There are likely countless thousands more just like them and we have and never will have any idea of who they are. Because frankly, they don’t care much about us. Nothing personal, of course, and if we met them in person, they might be lovely, relatable folk. The point is they are so engrossed in their own version of creation that the entreaties of the world don’t much matter to them.

There are literally millions of people out there in the world vying for your attention. Their motives vary. Some are trying to build their empire by luring you into their vision of what is and should be. Some are just trying to make a living. Others are “trying on” a sales job to see if it is what moves them. Some will stay the course. Others will make a switch while they still can. Maybe they are doing what Mom or Dad did. This job – whatever it is – is the only career possibility they ever thought about.

My father was a lawyer. My mother was a journalist and writer. Their jobs defined my life and my career. But my heart was in neither profession. I was drawn to an entirely different kind of career which – in the end – I did not pursue. Something along the lines of international diplomacy. At the point where I needed to make decisions to move forward on that path, I refused the jump.

My parents neither knew nor showed much interest in my career path. My father derided my university pursuits. He told a boyfriend: “What is Margot doing in university? She is only going to get married and have children.” I was on the Dean’s List and pursuing a double honors major at the time.

I now wish, of course, that I had been strong enough to assign my father’s opinion to the dustbin where it belonged. It is only the strong and emotionally secure who can stand up to the dictates of their caregivers. No matter how weak and emotionally insecure those caregivers were.

The consequence of raising strong, independent human beings is that they may begin to defy you and your expectations as their own lives take shape. Not necessarily in a belligerent, oppositional way but in their own way. As it should be.

Change is scary. Abandoning well-worn paths and habits to tread “the road less traveled” isn’t easy and can be fraught with pitfalls. There are pitfalls you may not necessarily be able to see simply because of your unfamiliarity with the newness of the path you are walking.

I think of this when I think of my own journey to address intergenerational trauma. In my parents’ eyes, life was as it was and there was little that could be changed or affected by our own actions. Neither of my parents was raised in a rose garden.

I watched them dutifully do what parents of their age and stage were supposed to do. They both really messed up – both their own lives and that of their children. “Couldn’t be helped.” “That’s life.” “It is what it is.”

So I choose to celebrate and focus on the elderly couple making mad passionate love when everyone thinks they are past it. I celebrate the failed accountant and struggling visual artist whose parents believed there was “no future” in pursuing a creative passion.

Obviously, I am biased in my tendency to celebrate writers. Those who try to plumb the depths of life’s mysteries and humanity and their own role and take on all of it. By so doing, they add to a perpetual and necessary conversation. That writing has been so denigrated and diminished as an art form is a symptom of the world’s current spiritual sickness.

I recommend we hold on to and encourage writers. When and if the actual day of judgment comes, they may be the only ones who can make sense of how and why we got there. For starters, it is unlikely they unquestioningly accept the dire predictions of religious leaders that eternal doom awaits all but good Christians.

Writers may be the only ones who can show humanity a better option and offer a way out of the grim finality for “non-Christian believers” when the rapture occurs.

What writers know is that our lives are built on and built out of stories. Choose or create one that works for you. Be skeptical that others have your best interests at heart when they are trying to change their beliefs into yours. Screw your brains out on the kitchen floor if it brings you joy. At the end, no one else’s opinion matters but yours.