Falling into old habits

This morning I ventured out of the comfort of my room to head out into the real world.  Lately, I’ve been getting severely overwhelmed being outside and interacting with people away from the computer.  This mostly comes down to the fact that I spend 95% of my day on a computer in my apartment either working or gaming.  I have very little social interaction outside my roommate and even when she comes home, it’s a little too much for me to handle socially.

This morning though, she wanted to take me to an Indian buffet called Namaste.  I’ve never really had Indian food, and she’s been talking this place up since she started at her job down this way.  The opportunity was ripe for the taking, so I jumped on it to try something new.

As I sit here at Starbucks, I realize just how out of touch I’m becoming again with the real world.  I’m uncomfortable.  I’m anxious.  I keep hoping nobody will notice me, talk to me or even look at me.  There’s two homeless people sitting next to me eating Michelina meals they purchased with food stamps.  They smell horrible, but they’re nice and they’re not bothering anybody.  I keep trying not to look at them so they won’t look at me, but I forgot how interesting people watching can be.

I need to make an effort to get out, even if it’s just a short walk or going somewhere further away for grocery shopping.  I need to force myself to interact with people.  I can’t keep stepping outside and feeling like my sensors are going to overload.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love what I’m doing, and I wouldn’t give up the freedom being a blogger gives me.  But how I feel right now is… frightening.  I used to love to meet new people, loved to learn new things but slowly I’m falling into old habits.  Shutting people out, shutting myself away and thinking it’s okay because I’m working towards something.

But what good is working towards something if you don’t know how to reap the benefits of what it’ll yield down the line?

"Your sadness is over an absence that is not new. It feels new, but it is only newly remembered."

I recently saw this quote on Twitter and immediately made it one of my favorites.  I don't know who the original author is and I couldn't find out much when I did look for it.  But it struck a chord with me.  It struck a chord straight to my heart.  I've been living my life for so long trying to fill an absence I lost months ago.  An absence I lost years ago.  An absence I lost more than 20 years ago.  Every day I live with this whole in my heart that I seek to fill by excess, whether it's food, drink or some other activity my obsessive compulsive nature latches onto.

There are only two things I've ever truly wanted in life: To write and to be loved.

I've been writing since I was a kid, as long as I can remember.  On some level, I think it's one of the few things in life that truly make me happy.  The world can be falling apart around me and as long as I pick up a pen and a piece of paper, everything will be all right.  I haven't always used that persistent nag to get me through the rough times.  But when the world was ending before me and I thought there was no light, writing has always been there for me.

In my delusion, I thought that I could be the type of writer I am and find love.  Find someone to spend the rest of my life with me.  I know, even typing this, that several people prominent in my life who care about me are going to object to this next statement.  I now realize this isn't possible.  Life has shown me that no matter how hard and how much I love, I simply will not find the person who can love me that much back.  I don't think it's because of the writing, I don't think it's because of the type of person I am, but I do believe it's because they realize that I want something they can never give me.

They cannot make me feel the way writing does, and I will resent them for that whether they realize it or not.  It will make me angry at them, it will make me judge them and it will make me go to great lengths to convince myself that I'm at fault (whether I am or not.)

Whenever I've been happy in a relationship, I've had issues writing.  Even writing work has suffered and been like pulling my own teeth out.  I find when I'm happy, it's the perfect storm for extreme writer's block.  My creativity has no outlet, it buries itself and so when something does go wrong, I go off the deep end mentally and emotionally.  Without the creative writing outlet - despite how happy I am - I find myself floundering with emotions that come spilling out in all the worst possible ways.

This really has led me to believe that I cannot truly find both.  This isn't to say others can't find both; I'm saying I can't find both.  Perhaps, I'm not truly mean to find both.  Maybe I do have to pick and choose which one I want.  I used to think it was love, but now I firmly believe it's writing.

So, that is the choice I make.

You either live your dreams or you don’t

Dreams are an interesting concept.  We all have dreams and aspirations we reach for in life.  They can as simple as taking a cruise to something as large as winning an Academy Award.  But how many of us truly reach for our dreams?  I don’t mean setting goals, stepping stones and crossing items off a checklist to get to an end point.  I mean, truly, madly living that dream despite it not yet coming true.  It’s much easier to think we’re on our way to our dreams instead of accepting we’re already on the road to living them, we just have to move towards them.

I’m tired of being afraid of living my dreams, because I already am.  I’ve always wanted to be a writer.  What do I get to do every day?  I get to write.  It can be a poem, the inklings of a short story or even something I’m being paid for, but I’m still writing.  I’m still creating something from scratch and that’s what I’ve always wanted to do.  So, why am I still afraid I’m not doing it when clearly I am?

Society has a funny way of making us think what we’re doing is wrong.  This has been true since humans were capable of forming social groups, creating norms and enforcing them on the rest of a group.  For so long I thought I was doing the wrong thing, I wasn’t being a productive member of society and I wasn’t contributing to what I wanted to do with my own life.  I was working towards impossible standards that weren’t even my own.  They weren’t even the standards of those around me.  They were the standards of some unseen societal entity we all tend to blame for things going poorly, things falling apart and things not seeming to be true.

I don’t want to live this way anymore.  I get to write every day.  I get to do what I love every day.  It may not be what society thinks is productive, it may not always pay the bills but at the end of the day, I am already living my dreams.  Now, the real question is, where can this dream take me?  Where can I go with it?  What can I do to grow, nurture and encourage it?

That’s where I’m at now.

I don’t want to spend another day pretending I’m not a writer.  I am.  I have plans, projects, ideas and I want to spend time evolving them into something more than just the spark they started out as.  There is no better feeling in life, at least to me, than creating something from nothing.  Not many people can do that or want to do that.  Most people are terrified of putting themselves out there on an original idea.  Not me.  It excites me, it encourages me and it makes me feel more alive than ever.

What's the point of productivity anyway?

I've been trying to up my productivity levels the last month, and I've found that like most things in life it's much easier said than done.  I've read some blogs, some articles and watched some videos on how others manage productivity in their everyday lives and none of this has seem to worked for me personally.  I find myself limited by the concept of productivity in a way.  So, the more I focus on trying to be productive, the less I actually am during a day.

I make a to do list every day.  It's just a basic sticky note in Windows 7.  I list what I have to do during the day, even down to the most mundane tasks.  The thrill that comes with erasing each item makes me feel good, but I think that's not actually helping me productive.  Most of the tasks I do day-to-day are just things that should be intertwined already within my day that I shouldn't need a list to complete.

While my productivity in the last month has increased, especially when it comes to my writing, I feel I could still be managing my time better.  I'm also beginning to wonder if we sabotage ourselves by trying to be focus on being productive.  What would happen if I just lived?  If I just did.  If instead of making a list, I just completed tasks.  Instead of tracking my progress, I just walked away once done.  Would that make me more productive?  Would that give me more time to do this and that?

There are so many things I want to do during my day that I don't get to do because I feel I'm limited by what I "have" to do.  It can be work, it could be writing, it could be something around the apartment, but I limit myself by what I think needs to be done instead of taking advantage of what could help me get more done.  What would waking up every day, no matter what is going on that day, at the same time for one week?  How much more time would that give me to be productive?

One of my favorite quotes is from H. Jackson Brown: "Don't say you don't have enough time.  You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein."

I think my next step is to set a schedule of being awake from 6 AM every morning to 10 PM every night just to see what I can accomplish.  It will take some time to get used to, and it may be hard at first, but what will the extra hours in my day lead to?  Even if it's the addition of a walk, a trip to the gym or just more creative writing rather than work, it can help make me more use of my time during my days.

Now, only time will tell.

I'm just a writer

All I've ever wanted to do in life is write.  For as long as I can remember, I wanted to write something.  I wanted to tell stories, I wanted to envision things others couldn't even conceive.  I know without a shadow of a doubt it's what I was put on this planet to do.

I like to attribute my love of storytelling to my paternal grandmother or "Nanny" as we called her growing up.  Whenever my sister and I visited her as kids, she told us these vivid stories about my dad, my uncles, her family and more.  I used to sit against the wall in her room and listen to her while my sister was out playing with dolls or went to the playground.  I loved listening to her tell a story, because the way she told it, I could see it play out in my own head.  I've always wanted to tell stories like that; I believe there are no better kind.

I've been living as a writer for almost 10 years now.  I took time off from college to pursue this career, mostly freelancing.  I've written on everything from mailboxes to iPods to everything in between.  I've learned search engine optimization, marketing techniques and just about everything possible to create web content.  While I enjoy the writing aspect of it, the challenge of creating content that people actually search for, find and read, I'm starting to burn out on just writing for the web.

I've begun doing writing exercises.  Mostly prompts for 30 to 45 minutes every other day to help get myself back into the creative writing spirit.  I've missed writing creatively, and it's a joy to see what I'm producing from these exercises.  Some have turned into bigger ideas, others have been filed away because I think they're embarrassing.

I've decided by the end of fall, I want to begin shopping around what I believe will be my first professional novel.  It's not necessarily the one I want to be first, but it's the one that has a story that will get me into the door.  I'm pleased with how it originally played out, and I know some out there have read bits and pieces of it over time.  It feels unpolished, but it will get better once I take the time to truly go through it and ask for feedback.

Who would've thought I finally had the courage to make it this far?  I've been holding onto several things for awhile creatively; I'm too scared to share with just about everyone, but I'm going to take that leap and see where it takes me.  What's the worst that could happen?