Fear based thinking

Things loom giant, unreachable, daunting.

(Those things did not look so large yesterday.)

Voices snuck in overnight and untied your confidence.

Doubt mingles in each small effort.

Comeuppance comes to mind.

Doldrums. Sails empty.

Spilled disappointment.

Trapped echos.

And egos.

Looking

for a

drain.

Since sharing my writing project "out loud" on St. Sunshine, I've spent over a month showing up at my desk Monday through Friday for a large pocket of hours to write words, paragraphs, and pages. It's been a practice of delivering whatever my best looks like on each day. I've given myself permission to write a shitty first draft (à la Brené Brown) and get down with what seems possible each morning. There is an outline, old journals, and notes upon notes of ideas I've have crafted over the last few years. I arrive with the intention to meet what's possible with hopes of expressing, literally and figuratively, what's gotten me through to today. Each day is a ride, an excavation, a strobe light on the details of, well, me.

Some days I feel like an artist in a large studio with canvases, some complete and some unfinished, leaning against the walls surrounded by all sorts of mediums to play with. On other days, its as if I were a small girl in a candy store debating whether I want a bag of just cotton candy jelly beans OR if I should include verry cherry and tangerine in the mix Or if I should do smorgasbord with jelly beans, Swedish fish, and dark chocolate nonpareils. And of recent, it's felt like I'm in a giant warehouse stacked with shelves of cardboard boxes marked with black sharpie writing I can't read and no ladders in sight. All of these boxes are mine, haunted with my handwriting, and they hover above, out of reach.

It can get very lonely writing about myself. I am both the surgeon and the patient, the artist and the model. While this project isn't all memoir, in the traditional sense, it's a deep dive into what's been beautiful in my life, as well as the traumatic. It's a revisiting of past events that left scar tissue and the map I crafted to tend and soften the wounds. Some days I feel powerful and equipped to do the work, other days leave me tender and overly sensitive. On small days unfriendly voices can visit and my ego tries to rule with harsh judgements. In this swirling of uncertainty is where I realize that fear is in the room. F.alse. E.vidence. A.ppearing. R.eal.

There is no gun at my head, no debt I need to pay. There is an aim, a desire, a resolution. Good. Bad. Readable. Garbage. Who knows? All I know is that I have to keep going. Maybe I need to take smaller bites and breaks, or maybe not. I've never written a book. Or so I'd thought.

The other afternoon, while watching Harry's flag football game, Dave arrived a bit late and handed me a belated anniversary present. (He'd told me about it before our anniversary- so it wasn't really belated, it just didn't get here on time.) It was a cocktail table sized book with of one my paintings on the cover titled St.Sunshine. The thoughtful and supportive husband that I know and love crafted a collection of all of my posts, paintings and all. And I haven't been able to open it.

I am blown away. I am terrified. I am unprepared to read its pages, worried that my small self mindset will stop me in my tracks. There are many pages to this book, many tellings and heart openings. I know, I wrote them. I released them. Out there.

I am working something big here. Of course it's scary. And new. And brave. The collection of my stories temps false evidence that I am unworthy to do this job and is trying to talk me out of something I have chosen to set my focus on, to put my faith in. And meanwhile, the universe keeps showing me more avenues to consider- fiction, poetry, prose, oh my. Teachers and angels. New means towards acceptance and new rules to persistence. By simply writing here, today, with moments of clarity only found on St. Sunshine, I rise above the worry and get to see the trail of breadcrumbs of my own becoming- as an author, an artist, a mother, a wife, a friend, a sister, a daughter. This book before me, I still have yet to open, shows that the proof is in the pudding. Each step, each post, each piece of art has transported me to what is today.

"Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things, I am tempted to think there are no little things." -Bruce Barton

With a fear be damned mindset & bit of spilled pudding,

St. Sunshine