Be Creative. Be Brave.
So this happened: Someone else wrote my book.
I was ready to write my book and I was serious about it. So serious, that in the summer of 2015, I stood up in front of my grad school cohort and declared that I would write it. I joined a writers group to help keep me on track and accountable because I was just.that.serious. about writing my book.
I did write. For a while. Some. A little.
And then I got scared. I worried that my message wasn’t something anyone would care about. What if by some miracle I finished the book and even more miraculously it got published and no one read it? Even more frightening: What if all of those things happened and EVERYONE read it? What if everyone hated it? What if everyone loved it?
There were too many unknowns; it was like looking into a dark forest at night and seeing nothing remotely familiar, everything as potentially ominous. In the vortex of self-doubt and ego, I started missing deadlines in the writer's group. I started missing meetings. Eventually, I’m sure I used the timeworn and unassailable excuse of “too busy and just not ready” and simply faded away. Oddly enough, though, I never stopped thinking about the ideas I had wanted to share in my book. In the six years intervening between when I started thinking about writing my book and now; I’ve been shown lots of reminders about why I wanted to write what I wanted to write. I saw those reminders, every now and then I would even think about pulling out my old files, but I never did.
Now someone else has written my book.
And you know what? I’m so glad someone was brave enough to write it. I’m so glad that message is out in the world. I’m also so glad that this particular lesson presented itself to me at this particular time; a time where I found myself once again on the verge of launching something new and feeling scared, wanting to turn back. Because it made me remember that creativity requires courage in order to bring it out of one’s imagination, put it into the world, and give it life. In his book, Courage to Create, Rollo May says: “In human beings, courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible. An assertion of the self, a commitment, is essential if the self is to have any reality.”
I’ve already purchased a copy of the book, the book that I was going to write. After I’m done reading it, it’s going to be placed front and center on my desk where I can see it every day because I am forever grateful to its author for writing it and for showing me the way forward to becoming brave and bringing courage to my creativity. On an ironic note, I created the word art image below as part of my summer 2015 grad school presentation. Back then, I was ready to say the words, but not ready to live by them. Now I’m ready to live those words, bring them to life, and this time I’ll be the one writing my book.
