Discover who you truly are and be that person to the best of your ability.
I’m not advocating hurting others, of course, but be genuinely your true self.
Sometimes we must search to find out who we are, what we believe.
The search may take months, or years. What counts is that we are truthful with ourselves. We may learn from others we trust. Or from reading. Or even writing, sometimes about ourselves.
It was years before I found my true self, that I was not the bad person I believed when I was young because I didn’t fit into others expectations or “normal” society’s order of right and wrong. Or that what happened to me was my fault.
I have written about this journey in posts on this site and will probably continue to do so. It begins here.
We often need the help of good, trustworthy friends or even educated professionals.
A child abuse survivor, I am so grateful I finally worked through major issues with the right therapists. One helped me learn how writing about what had happened to me would help, which was the very inception of my writing novels. These novels would retain at their heart stories of people attempting to live their lives being true to themselves despite all odds to the contrary, despite how “different” or individual they might be.
Fiction and nonfiction books have helped me tremendously on my journey to emotional and physical health.
May my writing help in some way to recognize a situation and/or a familiarity in a character, enough to know you are not alone.
Family secrets is another theme of my writing.
I recall that the most difficult part of my journey was believing I was alone with my terrible secret. Only years later did I learn my entire family had secrets of their own that stood between the true intimacy of us all. Thank goodness I had the unconditional love of my mom and was able to share some play with my sister. Though we were adults before we discovered how much we had kept from one another, mostly regarding our dad, who terrified us both.
Writing has become a perfect way to express myself.
I find more creativity and emotion in fiction than in nonfiction.
Writing has become an extension of the stories my best friend and I used to play when we were children. Stories that were our escape from our nearly unbearable realities and a way to express emotion we could not express in our daily lives and definitely not to our perpetrators.
Channeling emotion into my characters makes them more genuine. Knowing how they would feel in certain situations brings them to life.
According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Robert Olen Butler, the process of writing is not intellectual, but emotional, and it is necessary to enter our dreamspace in order to write honest, inspired fiction.
I dream a lot; our dreams dive deep into our true selves—into our anxieties, fears . . . and joys.
I express emotion through my stories. My sister expresses hers through abstract painting. Thankfully, we both found ways to do so.
Oh, my. Yes. I still do cuss sometimes. But the anger is like one of my characters says of the other, “it passes like a storm soon followed by a rainbow.”
I like to know what other people are thinking. I hope you will let me know. You can disagree with me, of course, but please be nice about it.
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