Fear This, and Write Anyway

This is the background on my computer right now.

 

I read this article on The Huffington Post Saturday and it's got me thinking about the last couple of days and how I've begun to realize I need to step out of my shell and do more with my life. Race Day (as I'm now calling Friday's day at the track) proved to me that I have a sense of adventure without fear.

So my realization is that if I approach doing something out of my comfort zone as an adventure I'll embrace it and do it to the max. Next question I have then is, can I apply this sense of adventure to my writing?

And my answer is a resounding yes. Now I've been writing since I was in my early teens and have had my ups and downs to say the least. I've been dutiful, fanciful, and lazy as all get out. I've had days where the words flew from my fingers and days where each one was pulled out of the muck. But never did I have any real fear until the last couple of years. Because it seems that when I got knocked off the tracks of my life (when my Dad had a stroke in 2009) I got rocked to my core. My writing, like a lot of other things in my life, got pushed to the wayside. And each time I went for it and tried to get back in the grove I haven't been able to.

This blog is the first time I've felt that grove become a possibility in my life. But the fear that I have with the writing is more of that it will take away from my life. Which is complete and utter bullshit as I have plenty of time and can make it happen like I did before. What I was thinking and feeling yesterday was that I should be doing something else. Tension and anxiety gripped me as I sat in front of the computer wanting to write but being paralyzed with anxiety and the awful feeling of writing not being a worthy activity.

Identifying fear is the first step in combating it. The fear I have is that if I sit down and write I'm taking away from someone else or something else I need to do. But the thing is I know I have a right to my time and time to write if I want to. And I want to because when I think about that writing grove I get a terrible craving for it. Not like a junkie craving but like a craving for a cup of coffee in the morning- a need almost.

So instead of writing being a burning need I'll approach it as an adventure. It'll be like sitting down at the computer and seeing which way the wind takes me. It'll be knowing that I can climb into the stock car of a book and grip the roll-cage bar as the writing-car takes off at a 110-miles an hour.