Breaking the Cycle of Doubt
and learn that even if no one reads what I write, it still matters
When I left Canada I was shattered, my confidence was broken and I felt like my life was a waste of space, time and matter. Most people I knew had good jobs, families and good social lives. I was hiding my reality and living in a box, getting rejected from everything I applied for and I believed there was something wrong with me.
If I am completely honest, I’ve had very few friends and have never been in a relationship. I keep to myself and just play at being happy and confident when in reality I end up repeating my matra’s of “I can’t”, “I don’t have any money”, “that’s not possible”.
I am sick of playing this song on repeat, I don’t want to dance to this beat anymore. It sucks, it is without joy or hope and all it can lead to is a quick death and a person not remembered.
How do you rise above the noise and find the courage to go ahead when all you feel is that you are destined to fail, that to fall is the only thing you can count on.
Even as I write I go down the rabbit hole of doubt and had the paralyzes my ability to move. Like so many people I am fighting decades of social conditioning, that failing is wrong, that you need to be secure, that you shouldn’t take risks.
Today I don’t see any other way to live that is happy without putting myself out there and waiting for the rifles to fire. Will I be able to dodge the bullets, round after round. No, but can I survive the onslaught without wanting to crawl into a hole and dying or waving a white flag, bowing in penance for my sins of going outside the norms.
I guess what really scares me is what if I write the story I want to and do everything in my power to get it out there and no one reads it. You can’t do it only for the audience, first and foremost you have to do it for yourself.
That doesn’t mean the whispers of doubt, the conversations about the risks or the looks that say without a word “poor soul”don’t matter but it means you do it not for the riches but because you can’t.
I was listening to a class that someone recorded about screenwriting by John Truby and he said that you should write a script to “change your life”. That even if you never sold it, if it changed your life than no matter what else happens it would have been worth it.
Maybe that is part of my problem I want to write something to change my life, I want something that will cause the Earth to quake underneath the soles of my feet, That what I did had and has purpose even if it is only for me.
As a person I have been waiting for lighting to strike but how can it if I am not writing. I know that I just have to write, even if it sucks, actually especially because it will suck, to fall as many times as it takes, so I can suck less, so the words won’t put someone to sleep or make someone want to start an effigy of burning books where all that will be left if a wiff of paper and ink, with the words turned to cinders in a hole.
I wrote a world of science fiction because I wanted to feel a sense of exploration and discovery in a modern context that reaches into the soul of each of us that is curious and wants to push the limits because that is what it means to be human.
I have never shared the world, I have told people about it but it lives for no one but me. It is like being a God, the one who decides the course of events that both destroys and creates new possibilities.
For me the question isn’t should I but how can I not without betraying the hopes that have been long dormant in my soul. Shall I fall, do I just survive or can I lift myself to see the world, the universe from a new perspective unencumbered by doubt, hate and or fear?
I have said this too many times, repeated this refrain too many times to count, I need to write a new lyric where I can begin the climb out of the baritone to the highs of a epic soprano for a full featured sound that will be carried like an echo across the far distance.
