Hope Writer Challenge - Restore

Today's prompt for the @hopewriters writing challenge is Restore. #hopewriterlife

I cannot tell you how words and stories may restore other people. I can only speak to my experience. I can only tell you what words do for me.

Sometimes the world is too much and the messages of doubt and fear and inadequacy overwhelm me. They begin to reinforce those intensely negative thoughts my inner critic tells me when I'm not paying too much attention. This inter critic is insidious, it won't engage when I answer back with logic because it knows it has nothing to say.

But it whispers dark fears in my ear when I am not on my guard. And sometimes it's blows land and I'm left reeling, wondering if it's right. That is the moment words are the most critical. I have to find the right ones to join my cause. Recruit the write poetry and friends to stand with me as I prepare for battle.
And for me, I must always do battle on paper. I must write.

You see, the critic thrives on emotion and in the dark corners of your mind where logic can't illuminate it and it can loom shadowy and unopposed. If I drag that inter critic into the light and put it on paper it doesn't stand a chance. The arguments don't hold up. Spoken in dark whispers, "you are worthless" or "you're unnecessary" can be weighty and can coil around you and feel inescapable. Such sentiments prey upon your emotions.

When you put those critiques on paper and engage with the ideas, it takes a little of the weight and sting out of them. So for every dark emotional thought that I'm worthless, that I'll never be a writer and my work is rubbish, that I'm a terrible person (the worst in fact); I make the effort to find at least one argument against them. I do help people and many people rely on me for support. I am capable of many things. And even if I wasn't, every human has worth. I may not be published yet, but I'm not quitting. I am a writer and no writer is perfect, that's what drafts and editing are for. I'm not a terrible person. I'm certainly not the worst ever. Historical examples of worse people abound. And I do what I can. I'm only human but I'm not a bad one. I'm kind of a decent person actually.

Just like that the tide of emotional darkness turns. In the battle for my mind, I drag my opponents into the light and expose their poison and trickery. I defeat them with carefully planned logic and words. Healthier words, truer words, more positive words.

Half the battle is knowing that you're in it and the other half is perseverance. You do not restore yourself in an instant with a flick of your wrist like magic. Restoration is a process, a journey, a series of determined actions.

For me it is important to change the story whenever I feel overwhelmed and belittled. If I feel obligated to attend a party that will be challenging for me because certain attendees make me feel small; I change the story. I look at myself and say "you have a choice. You are choosing to attend this party because you are larger than fear. You are the Queen and you have magnanimously decided to allow your enemies to attend. Pay them no attention." I might still be anxious, but making a conscious choice to turn the story around makes me feel less trapped by circumstances. I feel less small.

Remember that your life is greatly shaped and altered by the story you craft for yourself. Do not let it be created entirely by the critic who's views are false. Make sure you combat it with truth and hope. If you struggle to find the right words, augment your story with poetry that touches your soul. You can borrow someone else's words to help lift your wings.

You are the hero of your own story. No, you cannot change what has come before but you always have a chance to decide what happens next. You can pick yourself up and go about the important process of restoring yourself, put yourself back together with hope, words and perseverance.

So find good words. 

Find great words. 

Write your own words and don't ever accept defeat. 

Imagine a better future and fight for it.

Hope Writer Challenge - Remember

Today for @hopewriters writing challenge #hopewriterlife the topic is Remember.

When we talk about remembering it is important to keep in mind that memory is not perfect. It is perfectly possible to forget something that felt momentous at the time whereas seemingly insignificant things can linger for years to come.

I find that it is almost more important to record the little things that happen. The small moments that mean so much in life because life is not a straight forward journey. For me, I'm making sure to record the little things that surprise me during this time of global pandemic. I want to remember in years to come the things that made me smile in the midst of tragedy, the moments of friendship that lightened my load and encouraged me. I want to record for posterity the things that surprised me during this time and the things that I learned.

I used this double photo (in a spinning double sided frame) for today's image because I feel it represents life both in its journey and its singular strength and beauty. There are things I wish I could forget about this time, burdens I do not wish to bear. This frame sits on my desk to remind me that life is a journey much like a spiral staircase. It's as much about going sideways and around as it is about going up. Progress in life is often accomplished by going many steps sideways before you go forward.

On the other side is a photo of two buildings from two very different ages, both beautiful. It is straight lines and reflections. These buildings tell me that strength and beauty look different in different times. Every age of your life holds a different piece of your truth. Your strength and beauty grows and changes with time reflecting your progress, your journey. You are no less strong or beautiful for having different shapes and emphases in different ages of your life. Even as you reinvent yourself, it is built upon your old strength, just as the older building is reflected in the windows of the newer one.

May this remind you, as it does me, that even if you're different from the other buildings, you are still beautiful. You are still strong. You just need to keep following your own lines. Be your own building, for that is where your strength and beauty lies. 

Remember that and it will help you through the tough days when all your steps go sideways and you cannot see the end of the winding stairs. 

Remember too, that even when nobody around you looks like you, you are strong and beautiful and that your steps will wind upwards slowly even when you can't see it.

Hope Writer Challenge - Reach

An enormous Italian Renaissance style sunset over my house for the #hopewriterlife, writing challenge for @hopewriters about Reach.

Reimagine 2020 with an Idea of Writing Reach and Change

Italian Renaissance Style Sunset over San Diego

The moment I begin to reimagine this year I start by imagining it without cornonavirus.  My very next thoughts are of comparison, reflecting on the deep differences we see between now and the years we've known of late.  So, for me to reimagine this year with the themes of writing and reach in mind I must compare my present with the recent past.

Writing for me has always been something I must do on occasion when I can't sleep.  My mind runs mad with stories or turns of phrase that demand to be recorded.  Sometimes writing is how I process my world and thoughts, and it's the only thing that keeps me from falling to bits.  All of this is to say that writing had been a deeply internal process for me and reaching any sort of audience with my writing has been a rather new thought.

Only in this last year I stated to notice that there is a part of me that wants to be seen and heard with my writing.  And as much as it scares me to bare pieces of my soul to the world thus, there has been a nagging thought that it is selfish of me to keep these pretty turns of phrase and hopeful midnight musings to myself.

I don't exactly have grand dreams of reaching an audience for myself.  There's a large part of me that's still frightened to be seen.  But when I think of the purpose of my writing, especially now, I think it is my purpose, my duty, to offer help with words in any way I can.

In these strange times I've been writing again, for a data center company of all places; offering hope that people and communities can and will take care of one another in these days of doubt and fear.  In this unlikely place, I have found the opportunity to bring messages of the way that our infrastructure connects us, instead of focusing on our distance.

That is not to say that I don't feel fear and doubt myself.  I too have been overwhelmed. I have had my share of anxious nights.  I have cried for myself and those around me, feeling our losses and our hardships keenly.  I simply choose, whenever I feel such emotions, to seek out stories that acknowledge pain and still uplift.

I have in my search found hope in the strangest places.  I have found large companies using their considerable Reach to send messages of hope, connection and perseverance.  I have seen neighbors help one another, offering the help and services they can.  I have seen people donating food and masks and supplies where they can.  I have seen people writing letters to friends and holding video chats to check in with one another.  I have been invited to free painting classes and seen many strangers advertise free counseling and tutoring during this time.  We are all offering what we can.

And it may not be seen as a lot by the eyes of the outside world, but together when we all offer what we can to anyone we can help, we all make the difference.  My reach my not be large.  The five masks I helped make may not be enough.  And the words I can offer may not be groundbreaking.  But together, that is where we have magic.

For the reach of one person is small, but with many hands and more helpers we can reach so much further. If I can help one person who can then help two more, together we can make all the difference. Doing our bit is all we can do. Even as we may feel isolated and alone, even as we feel powerless, if we find one way to help someone else shoulder the burden of this time we are doing our bit. And together we can change the world. 

Together our reach is infinite and we are unstoppable.

I wrote this on May 12th and I think it's more true than ever.  As I reread it this week knowing what turmoil we are in trying to address the blatant racism and tragedy we have all seen it only rings more true.  Individually we may be small, and our reach unimportant.  But together, with all of us doing one small thing, we can make the world a better place.  Together our reach is infinite and we are truly unstoppable.

Hope Writer Challenge - Reimagine 2020 - Rewrite

Hope Writer's hosted an Instagram writing challenge to reimagine 2020.  The challenge had a different topic every day for a week. And the first day's topic was Rewrite.  I wrote about all of this on Instagram on my profile @madderhattery, but I'd like to repost the writing here because I think we need more words of hope these days.

Reimagine 2020 - Rewrites

Spring Blossoms in Chicago - photo by The Madder Hatter

As part of the Hope Writer's challenge I'm talking about Rewrites today.

As much as we may wish to change the things that have already happened, we cannot.  What we can do is take this unprecedented turn of affairs, this global pandemic, and use it to rewrite our lives.

Everywhere I look I see neighbors meeting and growing closer during this new distance.  Being stuck at home has forced us to look closer at our communities and see the very real things going on in our own backyards.

Sometimes, we get so caught up in the rhythm of our daily lives that we don't ask ourselves if it's the right rhythm.  This forced pause has caused us to look inward.  We can't run from our thoughts and doubts when they are the only company we keep.  So I think it's time we face them.

It's time to take the giant blank slate of our future and reimagine it.  How often have you heard someone shout down your dreams because they couldn't ever be?  It's just the way the world is.  Yet, here we are living in a world nobody had imagined.  It tells you something; some of the largest most unavoidable things about modern life are entirely arbitrary.  And not only can we change them, we can change a lot of them all at once in the course of a few weeks.

So take up your life and examine it.  Listen in the quiet for what you've always known you wanted and use this pause to start fighting for it.  The future can be rewritten, no matter what course it was on before.  Take a moment to learn from your fear and anger what it is your heart really wants.

Don't put off that project, career change, or dream.  Start down that path today.  Nobody can say what the future will bring, but it certainly won't hold the things you didn't bother to fight for.

You are the author of your future.  Pick up your pen today and remember that coming together (even when that means staying apart), is what makes us stronger.  Remember that there is always something you can do to help both yourself and someone else.  And remember that every single one of us will help shape the future.   So make it a good one.   Make it a beautiful one.  Make it a loving, accepting and hopeful one.  Join me and rewrite a better future for all of us.

A Whole Tree of Spring Blossoms in Chicago photo by the Madder Hatter 

I wrote those words about the global pandemic just a few weeks ago, but I think they take on new relevance now considering the racism and injustice we've all seen this last week.  Even reconsidering it all I want to leave you with the same words.  

Join me and rewrite a better future for all of us.

Making Art When Your Heart is Broken

There is a beautiful quote by Shane L. Koyczan:

"If your heart is broken, make art with the pieces." Shane L. Koyczan

When my heart is broken that's what I try to do.  I try to pick up the pieces and bravely find beauty.  I turn my sadness, my brokenness, my trauma into art.  I write of darkness and hope.  I write of crying and grieving.  I write of carrying on even if that means sitting down to cry.  

I have recently realized that part of this need to create art with my brokenness is because I have far too many feelings to leave them bottled up inside.  They well up, they overwhelm and then they overflow into what I do.  

This is Strach the Opossum, he is currently reading the Highly Sensitive Person and some Poetry by W.E. Henley and doing a bit of journaling.

I'm reading a book called The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You by Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D.  In it she has some very interesting research that talks about sensitive people.  Roughly 20% of the population is sensitive.  It is a real, measurable and scientifically proven trait.  And yes, we do feel everything more deeply.  This has to do, in short, with mirror neurons.  The way that mirror neurons work is that if you watch someone else kick a soccer ball your brain will have activity in the same area that moves the leg etc.  Because even just watching someone else do something, your brain processes the movements and so forth, so you feel a tiny fraction of what they are doing or feeling.  

They've done lots of research that I won't bore you with here, that proves that highly sensitive people have much more activity in their mirror neurons.  What does that mean?  That means that when you tell us a sad story, we empathize much more deeply than 80% of the population.  We really do feel it more.  You can read more about her book and blogs on the Highly Sensitive Person Website.

What that means for me is I feel everything so intensely that it often overflows or overwhelms me.  In the last few weeks I've been struggling to re-contextualize many of the struggles I've had all my life with this new knowledge that I'm not just "weak" or "too sensitive", that I'm actually processing and feeling more than 80% of my fellow men.  So, I'm frequently up crying about a story that someone has told me, hours after they've forgotten it.  I have trouble sleeping during this time of intense injustice and death.  I fear for the lives of everyone struggling with the unseen menace of Covid-19 and the insidious disease of Racism.  And I feel it all so very deeply that I can't sleep.  

So, I must do something. I often carry the burdens of other people's sadness long after it's healthy for me to do so.  I wrote about a person I met only once and couldn't stop thinking about in my post The Loneliness of a Stranger.  Often I feel sad for people I can't help.  I worry about people I'll never see again.  And I sometimes catch myself feeling glum about abandoned objects.  I personify them and feel sad for their loneliness.  It's too much.  So I write.  I write about the sadness and I write about hope.

I've written multiple posts about the heart and the heaviness that can live there.  I've written The Heart is the Final Frontier, and When a Glass Heart Shatters, and Mending a Heart of Glass.  In those I talk of hardships and how I dealt with them, the way I grieved and my new theory that it takes nine months to rebuild and repair a heart and I think it's no coincidence that it's the same amount of time it takes to create a brand new heart.

I've written of hardships but also of hope, of love and support.  I wrote about rekindling broken dreams in Stars in the Darkness.  

I make art with my heartbreak.  If it helps one person feel less alone it was worth sharing.  If it is only read by me, but it allows me to sleep, it's worth writing.  

And lately I've decided to try to make more positive beautiful things to fill the world with joy.  Don't get me wrong, I'll still write about sadness and darkness.  I think toxic positivity is a blight.  It denies us the true depth of feelings and the ability to heal through grief and sitting with and working through our sadness.  You cannot just plaster a smile on some things and pretend you don't need to feel.  It's not healthy or productive.  But that being said, while I do need to cry and grieve, and talk about my sorrows, I always want there to be hope.  Just like I wrote poetically about the journey through happiness, depression and back in Winter Without Happiness.  I still talk about the darkness, but I don't leave it there, I try to always end with hope.

So, of late, I have been trying to fill the world with hope and joy and beauty.  I'm trying to take my fears and my anxieties and acknowledge them but gently put them to the side and make beautiful things anyway.  I've been trying to write a book and it's hard and I'm nervous about not being good enough.  What if I don't do the story justice?  What if I write it poorly?  What if I don't portray my characters fairly?  What if I really don't have any idea what I'm doing and it all fails horribly?  

This is my writing buddy, the opossum named Strach.  He looks capable doesn't he?

If you had to characterize my inner fears and nature as an animal, I'm an opossum.  I'm a terrified baby opossum, with my mouth open swaying back and forth from terror.  About to pass out from fright.  It's not pretty.  It's pathetic really (in a melodramatic and slightly comical way).  So I ordered myself a tiny plush opossum friend to sit beside my computer when I try to write.  I've named him Strach, the Czech word for fear.  Whenever I get nervous I look at Strach and I pet him nicely, talking to him softly with compassion, and I reassure him and my fears, and then I keep writing. 

And this is so common for all creatives to have crippling doubts and horrible unspoken fears of unworthiness.  I've been trying to address this inner fear, this inner critic, this inner doubter with calm logic.  Because these overwhelming fears don't hold up with logic.  What if I can't do justice to the story?  Then I will make edits until I do.  What if I write it poorly?  I will learn to write better through practice and I'll make edits.  What if I don't portray my characters fairly?  I'll have readers help tell me how they feel and I'll write a second draft.  What if I really don't have any idea what I'm doing and it all fails horribly?  I can only fail if I stop trying.  I'll learn what I don't currently know and keep working on it til it works.  I like to address these because there's usually a secret fear under those that comes out last.  For instance, it'll go something like.  What if I'll never be good enough?  Or, I don't know anything!  And you feel so much better if you say, I am good enough to try and I'll keep learning til I get there.  Or, I know lots of things!  And I can always learn more.

So, I'm trying to gently set aside fear and anxiety and hurt and write of hope and beauty.  I'm trying to make art with all the broken pieces of my heart.  

And if it takes me an entire lifetime of creating beautiful things to make up for the pain and sorrow I've witnessed, then it will be a life well lived.  

My Phlebotomist and My Living Metaphor Morning

This morning I woke up and everything was as though I was living in a metaphor come to life.

How to begin?  Let's see, I've been having a bunch of tests run.  So, this latest one involved a mobile blood draw person who came to my house.  Modern technology being what it is, my personal, mobile phlebotomist showed up this morning and promptly got lost.  He called me from nearby, unsure of how to find me.  In his defense many people get lost on the way to my house.  They see the dirt driveway and assume it can't be mine and call from the road confused.

So I woke up and got a phone call that went something like this.
"Hello?"
"Hi, this is your phlebotomist"
"Hi"
"I'm trying to find you.  Are you at the construction?"
"Ah, no, I'm one driveway further up the hill.  I'm the dirt driveway right before the giant rock and the gate is open for you."

I then went out to meet him, but let me digress for a moment.  How hilarious is this idea?  Can you imagine if I was working a construction job and I called my personal mobile phlebotomist to come out to the construction site?  Because I'm now imagining that I'm a massive lumberjack looking man, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, wearing a hardhat and having my blood drawn in one arm while I jackhammer one handed with the other.  Or smoke constantly with the cigarette between my teeth while I bend rebar with one hand and my phlebotomist ties a little elastic cord around my other beefy arm.  I think it's a hilarious mental image.

I can just imagine these guys having their blood drawn while working, can't you? - "F-327-CVFriant Dam Construction" by Bureau of Reclamation is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 

Ok, now back to what actually happened this morning.

So he sets up and it seems that phlebotomists, not unlike dentists, tend to fill the silence with a bit of chatter.  The distinct upside being that you can actually talk and reply in this scenario.  He asked about my job, I said I was working in a museum.  He asked what I do.  I said I was a glorified secretary but I was staying in the history field since I was a history major.  And he began talking about how much he loves his job and how much that makes a difference.  Do what you love he says, and it won't matter how little the money is.  And then I look at my arm, in this living metaphor, feeling very much like he's implying that NOT doing what you love is to have the life literally drained out of you.

And then he started talking about how you just have to be open to opportunities.  That sometimes things are just first steps and you never know what will come from it.  That it's important for me to work in a museum and be open to the possibilities that can flow from there.  Again I look at my arm as he continues to fill vials.  Once a door is open, things flow through.  Maybe it was just the blood loss, but it all felt very surreal and dream-like.

"Don't quit your day dream" by Lindsay_Silveira is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 

Then we were all done.  He pet my dogs and said you could tell they were happy.  He said when he was little he wanted to be a dog and his dad told him, "you don't want to be a dog, you want to live life like a dog".  And with that last bit of wisdom, my phlebotomist departed.

So, there I was contemplating my mobile phlebotomist wisdom of the day.  Such a nice man.  And I ate breakfast and felt tired and I decided, no offense to my phlebotomist, who was amazing, that the world is full of bloodsuckers (metaphorical you know) and with that I went back to bed for an hour before work.