What It Was Really Like

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you have noticed that I like to take a cheery view of things and present ways that you can uplift your state of mind, your emotional well-being, take steps to enhance your creative life.

Maybe you have the impression that I am a goody two shoes, or a Pollyanna sort, who ignores the hard stuff in life.  Or, if you have known me for a long time, you surely know that is not the case.  You would know that I have a pretty salty attitude sometimes, and why that is so.

Either way, I'm going to change the tone of this blog and see what happens.

I've decided to open up about what it's really been like to live the creative life, from the inside, and in particular, about my journey to becoming a writing coach.  It's not all so much fun and games!

The decision to write has been a no-brainer for me.  I've always written things down, even when I lived in dire poverty, and tucked them away into notebooks in hopes that someday things would be different.  I made collages of images that made me happy, and opened up the books to inspire myself when the outside world wasn't giving me any space to express myself. I felt a sense of identity that I couldn't have in other ways, and it gave the hope that my vision cold be real.  I drew pictures, wrote poems, and wrote short essays about the things that I cared about.  For a long time, they just sat in the notebooks, biding their time.

Poverty is bad for the soul.  It makes people angry and cynical, and it stifles creativity as though it were a luxury.  In fact, creativity is the road out of poverty.  Taking small steps, one at a time, I began to build new roads into life, out of the isolation that I was experiencing.  I began to hope for prosperity and acknowledgement, for a better life.

Nurturing hope when everybody around you is talking doom, behaving in cynical ways, expressing anger,  is not easy to do.  And it's not a road to popularity, either.  So a lot went on in the deep silent spaces, where the eyes of the curious and the voices of the critical couldn't reach.  My interior life has been my strength.  Now I want to share it with you.  

What was it like to hide like that?  I felt bad about myself from just about every angle.  I bought into stories that didn't serve me, and that held me back from becoming my true self.  Let's be honest...it sucked.

And how did that change?  

What was it that pushed me out of my comfort zone, caused me to feel that I absolutely HAD to do something different?  It's not a story for one blog post.  It will take a while to talk about this transformation.  The reason I am doing it is that I feel it can add more value to your life than I can by making pretty images for you.  There's still a place for pretty images, and I will offer those, too.  My hope is that you will value them more by understanding what makes them so important to me, and relate more completely with what they mean for you.

In the coming weeks and months, I will open up about my story in ways that I haven't done before.  I hope this will be of value to you, my reader.  Thanks for your loyalty and support. It's not going to be easy to do this.  It will be worth it, if I can help you to become inspired to step out of whatever limitations you may be experiencing.

Schedule some time to talk with me about writing and what it can do for you.