Finally did my morning pages after a few months and thought I would share with you:
same, the random ideas come but nothing stays long enough for me to jot down. I am still struggling with the idea of writing something and time is growing near. I am almost 40 without a story to my credit. I want to be published dammit. What can I do to seduce you back? Why have you abandoned me? What do you need to flourish inside of me? Work is not me, you are me yet you hide, devise ways to stay away, making me seem incapable, unwilling to start putting something down for posterity. It is as if you are afraid that I will misuse you, abuse your nature, blunting the truth down to ignorance. What can I do to show you that I am more than capable, that I will be to true to you and no other? Our dance has gone on too long, the flirtation now a joke. It is time to commit to each other, to make it a real marriage. I do not know how to get flush you out, to get you to give me the words to show my truth. Instead, you have given me only silence and small teasers of what could be, wriggling away from my grasp whenever I come close to you. Enough! I need you. I want you. I desire you like nothing else. Come back to me. Make me whole. Make me right.
Number 1 Passion by Eric Handler
What is your #1 passion in life? Now, imagine what would happen if you incorporated that passion into your life daily. Write down your passion and keep it close to you. Remind yourself of it daily, just like brushing your teeth.
(Author: Eric Handler)
Reading has been my passion all my life and lately I have begun to incorporate it into my daily life by either going to bed reading or taking a day or two to make significant progress into a book. I am still split on whether I prefer the Kindle or the Ipad by my ideal still is a real book. Something quite satisfying about turning a page, feeling the heft of the book lighten as you make deep in-roads into its story and get stamped with new ideas and thoughts (can’t help remembering some of the passages from Freedom by Jonathan Frazen) and touched by the emotions and characteristics of novel protagonists.
Besides my literary passion, my other passion is trying new things and that has transformed very well at my work as I have managed to make mundane tasks more interesting or come at them differently. However, I am constantly stalled by my own insecurity and need to please others and I swallow my ideas, ballooning up with regret, festering inside with an urgent need to vomit out all the negativity. However, I am getting better and I see now that I do not have to react to every situation with emotion especially hurt and anger. I have learned to quiet down my emotional turmoil and hear what the other person is saying and see it from their perspective. Even if I do not agree, I see that people relax once they feel heard. It is a great feeling to make things happen when there is calm in important parts of my life.
I remember writing few months back where all my energy, ideas and focus melded into one need to get the story done. I was smiling and truly enjoying the process, just living the dream of being a writer, knowing that what was being laid down was pretty good and I could do this. I want that moment back, those blissful hours when it seemed becoming a writer full time was not a fantasy, that I was good enough dammit! Yet lately, I seem to have found people who either don’t think much of my writing or dismiss it. Worse, still I have others who manage to always feel bad about blogging or posting on Facebook even when I am supremely careful of not blogging names and keeping my status updates to a minimum. I feel stifled and trapped into being a certain type of personality on social media as if I have to apologize for being open about my thoughts and feelings. Sure, I have said too much sometimes and called out others when it was not my business to, and to that I can only apologize and call it a learning process, yet I feel trapped with the label of someone who talks too much. It’s soul and creativity killing to know that my words are scrutinized to be either dismissed or confirm my status as a big mouth.
I want my words to have the energy they did when I wrote freely and got them out of being in my body, bottled up for so long. That’s where I want to get to. Let’s hope that the ones who are judging me know that they are killing me softly.
10 Year Text by Tia Singh
Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Imagine your future self, ie, you 10 years from now. If he/she were to send you a tweet or text message, 1) what would it say and 2) how would that transform your life or change something you’re doing, thinking, believing or saying today?
This was an interesting and as the next to last prompt for this writing challenge, a very interesting one at that. I had to actually close my eyes and see myself 10 years from now (not fat, hair graying but not balding), and for a moment nothing because I was too involved in the now. I wanted to respond right away without thinking (getting the prompt over and done with) and then it hit me, really hit me, that this challenge was more than just finishing a task, it was to learn, grow and be the person I have always wanted to be. Instead, some of the prompts became little writing games rather than me finally admitting to myself that the only way I can move on in life is ACT rather than THINK
so the future will simply be? “Write Much?”
Overcoming Uncertainty by Sean Ogle
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Write down a major life goal you have yet to achieve or even begin to take action on. For each goal, write down three uncertainties (read: fears) you have relating to each goal. Break it down further, and write down three reasons for each uncertainty. When you have three reasons for your fear, you’ll be able to start processing the change because you know where the fear stems from. Now you’ll be able to make a smaller changes that push you towards your larger goal. So begins the process of “trusting yourself.”
Due to the writing challenge as well as things finally settling down for me emotionally and mentally, I can say that I am operating on all cylinders in all the areas I wish to improve on. I would say that I need to keep it going, no matter how minute the progress.
Wholly Strange and New by Bridget Pilloud
When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name;—— the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can you remember a moment in your life when you had life in yourself and it was wholly strange and new? Can you remember the moment when you stopped walking a path of someone else, and started cutting your own?
Write about that moment. And if you haven’t experienced it yet, let the miracle play out in your mind’s eye and write about that moment in your future.
(Author: Bridget Pilloud)
I remember the first time I started free style writing, it was under a timed essay for NCTE (National Council for Teachers of English), where we would write about anything. We had practiced many themes and topics in preparations but when the test started, I began to write about the time pressure, the room, describing my reasons for writing and it was then I truly knew I would win the contest. At that moment, my grammar was perfect, the words flowed, and although we had 5 page minimum with 2 hours, I ended up writing almost 12 pages about my life with my horrible handwriting, but it was bliss. It was clear. It made sense. I knew I would end up going to UCLA and win the only scholastic award in my life that meant anything. I don’t remember erasing much and at that time typing was not allowed yet my hand was sure and steady as I wrote about the room, setting my future in motion.
Fear by Lachlan Cotter
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is fear holding you back from living your fullest life and being truly self expressed? Put yourself in the shoes of the you who’s already lived your dream and write out the answers to the following:
Is the insecurity you’re defending worth the dream you’ll never realize? or the love you’ll never venture? or the joy you’ll never feel?
Will the blunder matter in 10 years? Or 10 weeks? Or 10 days? Or 10 minutes?
Can you be happy being anything less than who you really are?
I knew it would be difficult to take on the 30 challenge more so than anything else because it would require me to face my fear of writing regularly and perhaps on some sort of schedule. The stories sit inside me cobwebbed, yet I feel great anxiety when I start to dust off the past to write about it mainly because I have not dealt with the emotional consequence as well as having a turbulent present. So where do I begin? That’s the question I am stuck or similarly whenever people ask what I want to write about, I say Ziba but to be quite honest, I do not if that’s the first story I want to tell.
As I witnessed a good friends wedding from UCLA, and being around other UCLA friends, I realized how much I miss that perfect time when all that mattered was scholarship and friendship. It was a perfect time when writing came to be easy and words just appeared when I sat in front of the campus desktop computer. Yet more than anything else, I was not alone. I remember spending nights on my friend’s couch when I had no money for dorm housing, and benefiting greatly from the generosity of true friends who I see now 15 years later, and it is as if nothing has changed. We all have spouses now, and we are older but just for that one night, we felt like we were 21 again, laughing and giggling about the dumb things we did at UCLA.
Yes the insecurity returns when the 39-year-old me sits here and wonder what to write about and it hits me that more than anything else, I am fighting about my own story. I do not who I am anymore. Years ago, I had a defined personality and name away from Ziba Beauty but now I am just a co-owner and while the opportunities are endless, there is a sense of betrayal to my sense of what I should be doing: which is writing. So more than anything else, as I sit in this hotel room in New York, I am determined now to keep writing regularly and hopefully have something published next year.
Divine Idea by Fabian Kruse
Imitation is Suicide. Insist on yourself; never imitate. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Write down in which areas of your life you have to overcome these suicidal tendencies of imitation, and how you can transform them into a newborn you – one that doesn’t hide its uniqueness, but thrives on it. There is a “divine idea which each of us represents” – which is yours?
Currently, I have a tendency of copying and pasting my own old writings and not really creating anything new so I need to stop “killing” myself and just sit down and write.
