Day 5: 8,730 of 50,000 words
I’m sorry I have been scarce this week. For my absence I have two excuses: one valid, and one that’s not.
The first excuse is that I managed to burn my hand rather badly. The second is that blogging is kind of scary right now.
I’ll explain:
Starting where it’s easy, I burned myself a week ago. By accidentally (who does it on purpose?) pouring scalding coffee on the back of my hand. It blistered almost instantly – a line of white raised skin half and inch wide from the knuckle of my left thumb across the webbing of my hand and up to the knuckle of my first finger (this is the point when you should all be grateful I don’t have a working camera currently). As you can imagine, this has been painful, and greatly inhibits my stamina for anything involving the use of my hands – especially typing.
If you’ve ever been burned before, you know that there comes a time when the protective covering of the old dead skin becomes a hinderance; it acts like a natural bandage at first while the skin beneath the scald regrows and repairs, but at a certain point you’ve got to scrub off that old skin to let the new tissue feel the open air and grow and heal properly. This part of the healing process happened yesterday for me, leaving me with a long line of pink, shiny new skin. It hurts.
Today, I’ve been sitting for hours trying to figure out why I’ve managed to write fiction despite the pain, but then freeze when I try to blog. I looked down at this new tender skin, stinging and burning and totally new to the world and I thought: that’s what I feel like. Like the old dead covering of who I thought I was is gone, and here I am – tender, nerves growing and feeling things in new ways. I feel so naked to the world.
This process of writing so much, of living around the thing I’ve wanted to do for most of my life, of blogging about it and connecting with such wonderful people, has changed me. I’m feeling stripped down to bare skin, and I don’t know what to write when I come to this page. I’m myself – who is that? What do I have to say? Why would anyone care?
Ah yes, I have a demon: Doubt. And it’s asking that question that cuts to the heart of every artistic pursuit: can I be acceptable as the raw naked self that lurks beneath?
I know how to solve this for myself. I set a goal, I live up to it. Goals and challenges are my way of cutting through the fear. That’s how I write a novel each month, even if I have to start over or write 10,000 words in a day. It’s how I got through that damned Dirty Dash. So I have a new goal to cut through the pain of accepting myself: write more blog posts – scare out all those demons so I can fight them. I’ll start with 4 posts each week.
My martial arts teacher defines a goal as an enemy to be conquered.
What enemies will you conquer this week?
Here are some other people talking about fear and being yourself. Please go read and appreciate.
It’s like being a rowdy child, or a child who doesn’t want to dress off the racks at Abercrombie, or the boy who prefers ballet to baseball. Sometimes we dare to stand out, but often times we wind up following the parade everyone else follows. Hope Clark: Being Yourself Isn’t Easy
It’s scary to be yourself.
To be that raw and honest and vulnerable. That’s why most choose to hide.
Not me. Not any longer. Here is my pledge:
