Through the darkness…and finding light

Hello my beautiful friends. Once again this blog has found me absent for quite awhile. I was on a journey, well still am actually if truth be told. Every day that finds us questioning, asking the wise tribe members advice, etc….then we are on a journey. I guess that means that if you’re reading this post, you are on your own journey of sorts too. Well first let me say thank you for joining me on mine.

This life has given me a whole lot of sacks lately to carry on my back and I’m sorry to say I wasn’t wise enough to actually stop and put them down when it became too much. I needed to let alot go. Feelings, changing thoughts and most importantly my need to be responsible for others feelings. I can only control what I do and if I do it in love and you react in some sort of negative way to it, then I need to stop myself from trying to carry you. I need to let your reaction be your reaction. If it is anger so be it. If it is love returned so be it. But I need to solely take resposibility for myself. No others. So I can’t sit here and tell you how to live, what to do, how you should feel, and on and on with the list. I’m a people pleaser….I try to hard to be liked, always insecure in the thought from childhood that no one would like me unless I said what they wanted to hear, do what they wanted me to do and so on. As my bestie and favorite wise woman told me….girl, you are drowning…..

She was right. I didn’t want to admit it at the time but she could see what I couldn’t, being too close to it all. Wow, talk about truth smacking you in the face. I could have denied it, ran in fear from it or faced it head on. I faced the demons. I looked in the mirror and said you know what, she is sooo very right. Humph….now what?

I’ve had the pleasure of having the last few days to myself. Being married that is a very hard thing in my life to have. After spending short of work, every waking moment around each other I found myself like a loose flapping sail. I kept trying to grab the rope to keep tethered but in the end just let myself drift with the tides. If i was hungry, I ate. If I wanted a nap, I took one. If I wanted to sit on my ass and do nothing, well my friends I’m happy to say that I did that too. I would normally look back and say “what the hell were you thinking?” but this time I said no. I need to be me, with me, doing me things.

The silence was deafening….so I caught up on a tv show I enjoy and drank a few glasses of water to hydrate and found myself still up at 10:30 at night as opposed to my normal yawning by 7. I went outside and just looked at the sky and walked with the dogs. I reconfigured my emails from blogs so that the stress of waking to 120 each morning wouldn’t be so overwhelming. New blogs I had followed and had followed me yet never popped in got segmented to a once a week email. I awoke this working day to 30. That felt good. I found as I was downsizing so to speak I would start questioning myself, “what if they get mad”, “what if they stop following me”, what if what if what if…..I took my wise womans advice and said I am doing this out of love….for me. I can’t open up an email to 10 posts from the same person every day. It was sinking me. I couldn’t get any of my own writing done. It felt like such a dark place to tell the truth.

I had been toying with a new style of writing. I want to delve into short stories but I know my faithful followers on my other blogs of poetry are just as overwhelmed and busy as I am and I don’t want to saddle them with having to like what I write, or even to read it for that matter. When you mostly read poetry, as a friend once said on writing, size matters. It is a form of short stories that aren’t about peace and love and happy things. It certainly isn’t something short that can be read in two minutes either. It is dark, sinister and very un-me like. I was afraid of what i would find by going to the dark side of things. My husband always told me writers are a crazy lot and many have to create stress and turmoil to write out their heart and soul. Maybe there’s a tiny bit of truth in there but then I looked at it from a different angle. Being a writer means to use your creativity to produce something, whether it be art, painting,writing,etc….it had to come from a mind that see’s a little differently. So I did it. I wrote my story. It was very intense the phase of making the characters talk and I put myself in their place, in that mood at that very moment and just wrote out what he or she would say. I lost complete track of time and couldn’t believe when I looked at the clock and two hours had gone by. Here I was in this dark creepy serial killer style story and I had become almost like an onlooker to the whole story. It was incredible. It was intense. It was something I created and I was and still am so very proud of it. But I found what upset me the most wasn’t in the writing of it, the part that hurt was realizing so much I haven’t done for the taking of responsibility of what others would think. I denied a big part of myself because I was afraid of how others would look at me.

Was I doing it out of love? Yes. I was doing it because I loved myself enough to overcome the fear and at least try. Was it dark and creepy? Yes. Did it make my heart soar to be able to create my first story and have it come out in form the way I wanted it to? Yes. Do I worry about what others will think when they see it? Maybe still a smidgy bit but I have to do it. It is a part of me. It is my creation. It is a story. It isn’t real life. Could I get some nasty feedback about being a monster? I suppose. But when it comes down to it, by jumping in with both feet and doing something I didn’t think I would ever be capable of I overcame what I feared the most. Rejection, Trolls, the things that go bump in the night….you know the list. I stood up to my fear and I made it into the light from the darkness. I didn’t become the boy from my story. I became a woman with a purpose to be true to the real me. When I finally post it I will make sure I put a link in here somewhere to lead you down the dark path to where my mind was residing for a few hours. It’s not a pretty place but if I do say so myself, it is a macabre read, kind of scary good actually. (said with evil menacing smile of course)

I thank my wise woman, if you’re reading this, you know who you are. I thank me for giving myself permission to do what I wanted to, needed to do and for standing up to the fear that being a writer and a human being entails. I am responsible for me and only me. I am not responsible for how you react to what I do if it was done in love and with no harm in mind. I thank you for still being here stopping in even though I take journeys from time to time and am not here very much. I come back. I always come back….and alot of the time, even stronger than when I left. Thanks for once again joinging me on my endless journey to reinvention of self.

Peace and blessings my friends.

Namaste, Kim