The Soul of the Matter: Love the One You’re With…

Writers aren’t all that different for saner mortals. Even though most of us wear our freak flags like parade banners. As part of our every-day, we offer ourselves up for rejection–the very reality we tend to fear most. Because we’re bent that way. We write about our neuroses and dreams and innermost secrets. Then we go one step further in our quest to understand, by slapping our names onto what we’ve created before sending it out into the world to be judged. Which is tantamount to dropping your pants, then plastering a pic of the gory details all over social media. And in the end, most of us writer-types, the honest ones anyway, will admit that we’re TERR-I-FIED by the entire process, even though we cant’ stop ourselves from indulging in it. Why? For the same reason a “normal” person follows his or her passion. LOVE.

Crazy-Love-Graphics2

You don’t get to pick and chose how your mind works or what makes your creativity thrive. Life, in my honest opinion, is about learning to love who and what you are–and the love that you’re born to pursue.

Challenge that core reality, and you’re denying the inner freakishness that you’re here to explore and share. Take a look at my Things My Teenager Says series, if you want an idea of how proud I am of kids (and adults) who figure out exactly who and what they are, then fly that uniqueness proudly. I’m still on a path to owning my own stuff, probably a step or two behind my gifted teen. But I’m a writer. What can I say? I pay more attention most days to internal landscapes, than I do the world around me. I’ll catch up eventually. I’ll understand, one of these years, everything that love is supposed to mean to me and everything it’s not. Until then, I’ll be crazy, loud and proud, and fake it ’til I make it.

crazy love graphic

Being crazy in love with your uniqueness, even when it means standing out in ways that shriek at your insecurities and desperation to belong–that’s the life goal I wish for myself. And yourself. Own it. Understand it. Whatever “it” you are, be that, out in the open, without conditions or excuses or any attempt to explain. And love the result, no matter how differently other people’s lives and relationships might be.

Take writers again. There are countless numbers of us walking amidst the rest of you, doing our best to look and act normal. But get us together to talk about what makes us weird, at a dinner table or in the corner of a party or in a car on a road trip, and trust me, it’s like an episode of Seinfeld on crack. Just try and stop us from relishing each and every weird thing about us. Just ask my teenager how sick and tired he is, of how effortlessly I seem to attrack other writers, even ones I’ve never met before. And how easy it is for me to lose entire hours with them, while the teen cools his heals nearby, sharing a unique world-view with someone else who sees things just as strangely.

It should be a  relief, a religion, to be crazy in love with how different we are. Who in this world is normal?. Maybe the key to this journey, is finding the small pocket of others like you, who’ll celebrate you, so that you can stop apologizing for being what you were put here to be.

crazy love swirling

Writers string together words and images that only exist in our minds, giving up hours, days, weeks and months of living, because we interact best with non-writers through story.

I’ve come to accept that’s the soul of the matter for my business. Yes, it’s a job, but it’s a business about connecting to the world and seeing the world and digging deeper into the world every day, until I discover what I need to share next. For me, writing is the same as the athlete or the entertainer, the extrovert, who plays to the crowd and feeds off their energy. Except my work as a writer is to play to a single, solitary mind at a time, sending my energy out, then sitting back and smiling as it returns one satisfied reader at a time, often while I’m agonzing over the next project.

Who the hell would decide to do something that crazy for a living?

Not that it’s really a choice for me anymore.

So I might as well love the heart, the soul, I’ve got. And learn to do what I do with more passion and dedication every day I proudly wave my freak flag.

What’s at the soul of what you do?

How can you stop hiding that essential part of you, and love the one you’re with?

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2 Responses to “The Soul of the Matter: Love the One You’re With…”

  1. robena grant says:

    I absolutely adore this post. It speaks to me on so many levels. Thank you. : )

  2. Ted Henkle says:

    I wish I could remember where I read this comment:

    “Normal” is a setting on a washing machine.

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