Epiphany?

Long ago, in a far away land , lived a girl who loved to write. She spent hours penning thoughts into her journal. She wrote poetry and song lyrics, and occasionally attempted short stories, though she knew her writing strengths lay elsewhere. She wrote for the school paper and edited the literary journal. She loved research projects that culminated in term papers, and her teachers encouraged her to keep writing.

She went off to college majoring in English with a Communications minor. She planned to teach English and to write. She loved her classes and easily pulled a 4.0 average her freshman year.

But she caved in to those who knew "better," and she transferred to a different college, closer to home, to pursue a "better" degree in business.

She struggled the next three years to understand her courses. She got honorable grades, but all that business stuff did not come naturally. Whereas writing was intuitive, financial analysis was not. But, since it was "better," she stuck with it.

For the next 20 years, she dreamed of writing, but she didn't write. She had surrounded herself with people very much unlike the writer she dreamed of being. She tried to be like them, but she never fit in. She always felt like a fraud. She stifled her opinions. She suppressed her thoughts. She lost her words. She was miserable and could find no way out. She couldn't express herself. She no longer even knew what she would express if she could!

After awhile, she had no opinions. She had no thoughts, no preferences, no words. She was on auto-pilot, going through all the motions, yet feeling nothing. Her only emotions were fueled by her children; her love for them was fierce. But aside from them, she was stone. She ended one marriage, and her second was in serious danger. She needed to come alive again.

She needed to write.

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I need this bootcamp even more than I realized. I need to feel, to think, to postulate and to have opinions again. I need to stop being afraid to write. I need to stop worrying about people not agreeing with me, or liking me, or that I must be wrong if someone else thinks differently. I need to be less afraid of confrontation. I need to be strong enough not only to develop an opinion, but to argue it if necessary. I know I can't do this without writing. I can't think clearly enough to do this without writing.

I didn't realize before writing this post how much of my life I have missed because I stopped writing. When I stopped writing, I stopped living life to its fullest and I lost me in the process. Twenty years is a long time, but another twenty will be gone in a flash. And if I don't start writing now, I will have missed that, too.

I don't want to be an automaton any more. I want to enjoy life because there is so much there to enjoy. I don't want to just watch anymore, envying all those who seem to play without caring what they look like, to talk without worrying that others might disagree, to care without fearing the pain that might result. And I don't think I can do this without writing. I don't process things well if I don't write them down. So even though I may not make my fortune through writing, I will realize a greater reward in a life well-lived...even if it's missing 20 years in the middle.

I didn't know what I was going to write about for my five minutes tonight. I was really wishing for one of those prompts Kai talked about! LOL! Instead, my writing time extended well beyond five minutes and I had an epiphany of sorts.

How great is that? :-)