I've been creeping up on my scriptophobia sideways. Moving very carefully so it doesn't see me. First, I started by making a deal with my son. We'd have a writing club and we would both write together at the same time from a topic that HE gets to choose from a bowl. My son made noticeable progress in his ease of writing. Me, not so much. I could write well enough from a given topic but still panicked at the blank page.
Still, much of my fear seems to have disappeared when I wasn't looking. I think it started with my private journals. I don't journal to record my life for posterity, I journal-as-therapy. My journals are filled with my particular stresses & challenges. The were (ARE!) never meant to be read by anyone! (Not even me!) I had used this tool as a tool to get thinner & fitter by journaling about it. I was recording all of my thoughts & struggles with it, including notes & information on the dozens of books I read on the subject and the thoughts they inspired.
The next step would have to be when friend and I decided to help each other with our respective weight & fitness goals. Since we do not live close to each other, we would talk on the phone and we would.... you guessed it... journal. We put them into Google docs and would both write our own and comment on the other. This was really useful. Even though we both had lessons to learn to get as fit and healthy as we'd like, they aren't necessarily the SAME lessons. Sharing our strengths & weaknesses and different perspectives really helped in breaking some bad eating habits. It also helps to have someone call "bullshit!" when you are justifying a forbidden cookie. This meant that I was writing with the knowledge that someone WOULD be reading what I wrote. Because it was a very close friend and trust was absolute, it was OK and that barrier was broken.
One thing leads to another. Having had successes in getting fit and loosing weight, I was very motivated to go further. I started getting more active on a weight loss/health website called SparkPeople (I recommend to everyone!) This lead to comments on message boards... then emails....then frequent blog posts. The next thing I knew I was having to break up my chronicle of my journey into pieces to fit into the SP blog format. Now, I find myself planning out the next several "articles" in my head and have more ideas, than time to write them.
Admittedly, all of this is directed at friendly semi-strangers also trying to loose weight in an a very non-critical, supportive environment. And an environment where good writing is not the criteria of success. But still.... I am CHOOSING to write!
They say if you want to be able to write than you just have to write. The more you write the more you are ABLE to write and the easier it gets. (Ironically just like exercise & weight loss.)
I don't think I ever realized that my desperate efforts to loose weight would cause me to loose my biggest fear!
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