Just Writing

Ah, the beginning of a new year.  A time for making resolutions and new starts and goals and failing miserably at accomplishing any of them.  It's such an arbitrary break-up of time, the new year.  It's really just another day.  We mark this time of the year as a "new beginning", but it's really just a continuation of what we have begun yesterday, and the day before, and the weeks and months before that.

I have all sorts of goals and dreams in my head, but every time I start to dwell on them, it actually leaves me discouraged.  Why?  Because I don't tend to finish stuff.  I start stuff.  I get excited about stuff.  But I don't finish it.  I started a doula course through Childbirth International in September, 2007.  I haven't finished it.  I'm not even halfway.  I haven't even looked at it since last March, when I became inextricably stalled on my first assignment.  I don't know how to overcome that blockage, so I just stop.  I want to be a doula.  But I can't imagine the reality of actually doing it.  It looks very easy when other people do it.  But for me, it's only been a challenge and a hardship.  I'm not sure what to do with that intense dream in my heart.

When I was a little girl, I wanted to write a book.  I wanted to be an author.  I started so many books.  I never finished any of them.  I had great ideas and lofty thoughts, and they all fizzled after 20-30 odd pages.  Stalled.  About 10 or 11 years ago, shortly after I graduated from university, I answered an ad I saw for a "Writing for Children" course.  It was a great course, all correspondence.  I had a wonderful writing teacher, an author, critiquing my work.  This course almost got stalled, too.  I had a baby.  Ethan was born in the midst of my very last assignment and it was painful knocking that thing out.  It took months and months and many phone calls, asking for extensions, which were graciously given.  I did finish.  I finished well.  The course promises that the final assignment will be deemed good enough to submit for publishing.  I wrote a publishable article for a children's magazine.  I did finish the course.  I never did submit that article.  I should have.  But "life" took over.  My new baby, my husband's search for a job, moving overseas...  It all took over.

I wasn't unhappy for my regular life to take over.  I was a happy mum and a happy wife.  I liked our life.  It was hard.  It had challenges, but I didn't feel unfulfilled.  In fact, becoming a mother fulfilled me in ways I never could have imagined.  I often thought, wow, this, is what God designed me for!

Of course, he designs us as multi-faceted human beings.  Our hopes and dreams usually do not center around one main thing.

The summer of 2010 was a dark one for me, darker, in some ways, than the previous year, when I was first abandoned.  I pretty much had no hope at all, for anything.  I had no friends, I had no home (or nothing that felt like home), I had no marriage, I felt like curling up in a ball and sleeping the rest of my life away.  I did not want to play with my kids.  It was summer and I didn't want to go outside or go anywhere, so we stayed home almost all day, every day.  I ached for the pain my kids were in, but was frozen within my own pain.  I wanted everything to go away.  I would say it was probably the closest I've ever been to having a true, clinical depression.

It was during that summer that I began praying for new dreams.  All my old dreams were shattered and my mind and heart were revolving aimlessly around the broken shards and pieces of them.  That was getting me nowhere fast.  The first "dream" God brought into my head was my doula course.  And I picked up my neglected books and read and delved in.  Until my "stall" back in March, 2011.  The other dream was writing.  This one scares me.  This one scares me because I know, because I read a lot, that I am not the best writer.  I'm a good writer, I've been told.  Yes, I've been told by my parents and one of my aunts.  And not to say they don't have valid opinions, but are they objective?  I'm not sure.  The idea of writing is so much different than it was when that dream was first planted in me 30 years ago.

30 years ago, there was no internet.  30 years ago, I was inspired by a man named Gordon Korman, who wrote his first novel at the age of 10 or 11, and it was published.  He was the reason I was going to write a book!  A lot has changed in 30 years.  A lot has changed in 10!  Even 10 years ago, when I was doing my children's writing course, the internet was around, but it was not nearly so prolific.  Not many people had heard about "blogs", let alone had one.  Now?  Man, it's hard to find someone who doesn't have a blog.  Everyone who has ever had any small iota of writing talent (and many who have none) can write online.  Some people even get paid to write online.  The pool of talented writers has grown exponentially because of the internet.  What on earth makes me think my writing could possibly get noticed.  Every time I think I have something intriguing to say, I find another blog where the writer has expressed herself/himself in a much more eloquent, funny, and insightful way.  Where's my niche?  What would make anyone (who isn't my family or friend) want to read what I have to write?

But God put that dream there.  It scares me.  It scares me a lot.  It scares me that the only things I want to do make little or no money.  It scares me that I have dreams I don't know how to realize.  I don't know how to finish.

But God put that dream there.  I want to honour the One who made my heart the way it is.  I am going to write in my little blog.  I am going to practice here, because I'm not sure what other direction to take, and this is my "space".  This will be my start.  I don't know the finish.  I can't see it.  All I know is I need to follow the path and the talents and the dreams God put in my head 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 30 years ago.  He put them there.  And I want to honour him by following where He might lead.