Re-Invention

I’ll be honest with you.  Re-inventing yourself is a bitch.  Seriously.

If you’ve known me for a while, then you know that I set out to re-invent myself a few years ago.  To make a long story as short as I can make it, bad shit happened.  It freaked me out.  I mean, it literally caused me to completely doubt life as I’d known it up to that point.  It illuminated me to the fleeting nature of our existence and all that.  I went through some seriously rough times.  In short, somebody died.  I blamed myself.  I decided I could no longer live within the status quo.  I struggled with how to change the status quo while being too scared/stressed/whatever to think rationally.  I jumped into the first escape pod I could find.

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
- Anais Nin

If you’ve ever undergone a major life re-organization, you understand.  If you’ve ever gone through post-traumatic stress, you understand.  I was there.  I was trying to figure out how to get out of being something I no longer wanted to be, while figuring out what I wanted to be… hell, what I could be.  I believed, at the time, that the job I was in contained my only marketable skill set.  That was a huge obstacle.  What I really wanted to do…  What I had always wanted to do, was write.  I have always considered myself a writer, even when I hadn’t created a single piece of writing not directly related to my job for quite some time.  Yet, I did write things for my job.  So, I was writing in some form.

I decided that I wanted to re-organize my life so that I could begin to pursue life as a writer.  I started a blog for the dual purposes of getting my thoughts and feelings out there in front of me and to get used to writing every day, whether I felt like it or not.  I got a job in the video game industry, albeit in retail management, but still working with video games.  There I was able to combine my love for gaming with my years of leadership experience.  But things got complicated, as things often do.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped writing.  I got sucked into the daily grind and lost focus.  It’s easy to do.  There are bills to pay, family and friends to spend time with, there is work to be done.  I took me almost two years to discover that I had lost the path again.

Now, I’m back.  I may not be completely on the road yet.  I haven’t gotten to the point of publication yet.  But I’m at least headed back towards the right road.  I’m writing again.  I can’t say for sure that life won’t bite me in the ass again.  It has such sharp teeth.  I am trying to avoid being pulled back towards the old status quo.  I’m trying to focus on my goals.  I am visualizing the outcome.

I am (and I can’t stress enough how important, how vitally essential this is) surrounding myself with people who have their eyes on a similar prize.  Sure, right now the contact is all online.  I am following them on Twitter.  Some of them are following me on Twitter as well.  I need this community in order to see that it can be done.  They have already given me so much, mostly without even realizing it.

Yesterday, this community gave me several things.  If you aspire to be a writer, as I do, or any sort of creative artist, from musician to graphic designer, you need to check out these links.

Daniel B. O’Shea is writing a serial novel on his blog.  This is amazing.  Yesterday, he wrote about moving the ball.

Jason L. Blair, creator of the Little Fears role-playing game, told us about Operation: Awesome.

Author and game designer Jess Hartley shared some inspiring news with the world yesterday.

These stories tell me that it can be done.  It’s just up to me.  I have to keep moving the ball.  I have to keep putting the pieces into place and not let myself get discouraged with the pace of my progress.  I have to start my own version of “Operation: Awesome” and set measurable goals.  I have to apply myself and get words on pages, no matter what it takes.  But first I have to educate myself on process.  And I have to also find time for reading and research (which does include video games, especially in the genre I’m going to be writing, horror/thriller).

Here’s to moving the ball.