Cutting back, moving forward.

So, I am making a couple of cutbacks in my life. Namely, the ways in which I employ procrastination to keep me from doing what I need to do, which is write, create, live. Procrastination manifests itself in many forms in my life: instant messenger (incarnate in 3 different interfaces), facebook, myspace...the list goes on and on. it interferes with my ability to connect with people in real life. and i knew this. i knew this for a while, yet I kept on. If you haven't noticed, and probably most haven't, but my motto is, "it's a new year and I'm a grown ass woman" and part of this motto is contingent upon my acceptance of the necessity to do the things that I need to do in order to get where I'm going.

I've been doing a lot of recalling. Memory is an important tool. The uninvited memory is important, too, as it gives you glimpses to things you need to see that perhaps you wouldn't have gotten on your own. For example: I am reading this book "Writing on Both Sides of the Brain," and this one example of a six year old writing a story reminded me that I have been writing since kindergarten. My school had a "publishing" center. Basically it was fancy wrapping paper and cardboard and colorful masking tape, but if you had a story, you could go to this corner of the library, pick out your "cover design" and give them your manuscript and author's photo, and they would bind it for you. Really it was just staples and the gray flimsy paper with the writing guide-lines on it where you wrote almost three times as big as you would today. I remember doing all sorts of stories just so I could take my manuscript there and have them bind it and I got to hold the finished product in my hand. I needed that memory. I did. I'm in a slump and not really writing, and sometimes it worries me. Then I needed to be reminded about the childhood inhibitions and how freely I wrote, how eagerly I sought to get it in people's hands. I have proof that I was destined to do this since age 5. However, something in my immediate environment would have me think otherwise. Why do we do this to ourselves? Psyche ourselves out of the things we've known all along only to drift so far away that you're out in the middle of the ocean on a broken boat and remembering that if you had just done one thing differently you wouldn't be where you are now, and now is in a situation that will take only faith to get out of alive.

So you cling to faith. So I have been clinging to faith. It's the only tangible thing in the middle of the ocean, right? Faith as tangible. Yes, I said it. Sometimes, my faith is so strong I can hold it in my hands and see it - I can see what I believe will happen or come to be. Sometimes that requires a step back. I have to see who I was before I got here: in kindergarten wanting her words in a book. I have to hold that image in my head for a while, and then attack my situation with the same childhood abandon as then. The idea of being out in the middle of the ocean would never have occurred to me then. I always had answers and solutions. I was a smartass. In someways, I still am, though I've tamed my tongue and subsequently tamed my actions. I'm not visiting that publishing center as I would have (as I did) in kindergarten. I'm not sending my work out. I'm not producing work. My kindergarten mind never told my pen no, that's not a good idea for a book. And so my pen always had things to write. My kindergarten mind was hardheaded and never took no for an answer. I need to go back and reclaim parts of my self.