Developing loving behavior.......

Edith Sitwell wrote, "When we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen." I am my own worst enemy. I am a defeatist at heart. My greatest battle is do I or don’t I let others see my behaviors are a reflection of my inner state of mind and my emotional well-being.

When I am writing a character I am reflecting how I feel about myself in the development of that character. How I am treating myself and the people in my life that day is an indicator of how I feel during my writing of another person. In order to keep my emotions in check I must become disciplined in the belief that I have value simply because I exist.

I must pass this belief on to my characters or I will never finish bringing them to life. Believing my life has purpose is to believe I have something to contribute as a writer. In order to finish developing a character I must believe they have something to contribute to the story. It is in my ability to love myself and love my characters that I am able to believe we both have a purpose. My purpose is to write a place for my character to be and my character’s purpose is to become someone I can relate to in the story.

How does all that self-love and belief in purpose manifest itself to help me write? I can't remember the last time I didn't want to feel responsible for someone or something. Who I am is a caretaker. I am in a perpetual search for someone to help. I people watch. I have interactions where others would miss the opportunity. I pay attention to the details of the day. In every experience I have as I go about my day I am writing. It is the caretaker in me that allows me to take such care of the characters I develop.

For years I self-destructed because it was so automatic to think of others without a thought given for myself. In those years I never wrote a word. I stopped believing I would ever write a single sentence. But as I have learned how to accept the person I really am I have been able to turn what once held me back into something that pushes me forward.

The ultimate achievement in my day is if I lived in moderation. Anything in extremes is not real it cannot last. Everything in moderation has the time to become real and be nurtured into something that will last.

I have finally found the grey area in this writer's life. I don't have to be all this or all that. I can exist very nicely somewhere in the middle where it is grey. In the grey is where I let go of my defeatist attitudes. I am able to just be me. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I succeed. Neither one owns me anymore. In the grey area I am becoming the writer I always knew I could be.  

I am a composite of all that makes me who I am. The more I am able to accept myself the easier it is to walk up to the laptop, have a seat and write. Mahatma Gandhi said that on those days when life doesn't go my way I must believe my failures are blessings with just as much importance as my successes.

I can look back on those years of not writing as years I failed. I can choose to beat myself with regrets, self-doubt and defeatism. I can always remain stuck in what has become comfortable which is failure as determined by my own set of high standards.

Failure is just another word for fear and guilt. I can choose to be comfortable in my failure or I can choose to experience the life I was meant to have. I can get up from the laptop, go back to bed and avoid writing or I can stay put and feel what uncomfortable feels like until I learn that this new feeling one day will also become comfortable.

When I have an attitude of defeatism I am not accepting parts of who I am. With my attitude of failure I sit at the laptop and stare out the window oblivious to life going on around me. I am so deep inside my own negative thoughts what I am looking at isn’t even registering. The voices in my head are so loud I can’t hear my own inner voice.

Only I can choose to live the writing life I was meant to live. Only I can change my attitude of failure into willingness to risk. I am not the only one who has to live with the choice I make to write or not write today. Those around me also pay the price for my decision. When I am living in the extreme of all writing or no writing I’m not living contently in the grey.

I am responsible. I am the one. I am where everything stops. I am in control of only my choices today……………..