Some time ago I was looking at an item on my writing list. I had an idea and a title but no shape for the story yet, no path that would lead me from the opening sentence to the closing period. So when I went about writing it, I let myself go wherever it would take me, leading to a very different story than I had written before. It was a great piece, actually. It had a true storyline, some humor, a teachable moment, and some fluffy bits about loving your mum. I was confident that everyone who’d read it, would absolutely love it.
It just had one issue: it felt off, just so very wrong. So I re-read it over and over, envisioning the faces and touched feelings of the people featuring prominently in the story, and it hit me: I had written fiction. Life inspired fiction around true events, yes, but fiction nonetheless. The characters were distinctly edited from their real life counterparts – one glossed up, the other thrown under the bus. Without noticing it at the time of writing, I had made heroes of some by belittling others. I was horrified, I had almost sacrificed the truth about a real life person. Some part of me had highjacked that story and turned it into something different, something unkind.
I had written the wrong story.
Once I let go of a story, once I hit “publish”, everyone is entitled to read and interpret it the way they want to, feel about it the way they want to, and I have no control over that whatsoever. That is scary af, and looking at “what if people don’t like it”, or more precisely, “what if people I dearly love don’t like it” and then braving it, acknowledging it and letting it go is … hard, to say the least.
That day, I didn’t and I wrote with one person in mind, and with the hidden agenda of wanting to make that person love the story. Love me, really, for writing it, for making them look good and thereby make them fall in love with all of my stories and my journey.
To that end I had written a fairytale, including a villain to overcome. A story to hide behind, to please, to entertain. A story disguising my fear, a story without true joy. True joy does not come at the expense of another, it does not require blood sacrifices or even just the comparison of my life with someone else’s.
That almost the right story, up there – but I never published it. It still felt unfinished and un-real to me. Something was missing, and now, over a year later, I found the missing piece.
Me – and the wrong story I was beginning to tell myself at that time.
I abstractly wrote about the fear of being rejected for what I write, for who I am, since this writing is me, uncensored. I hadn’t acknowledged yet, that it wasn’t abstract fear, it had already become reality.
The lesson to be taken? Listen deeper, more carefully to myself. I had it right there and then, but I never went farther than acknowledgement, I never looked it in the eye, but instead avoided it. Saying “I am afraid of this” is one thing, admittedly an already scary thing, but just the first step. Sitting with the fear, inside it, allowing myself to feel it, the full brunt and deepth, and acknowledging that it is, indeed, not an irrational fear but something that is happening right tnow, is the second and by far harder step. Only then can it be let go.
When I look around myself, panic and fear sprouting everywhere these days, pushed along by the daily dose of media, I think the world could do with a little more of us doing the hard work of facing, dealing and eventually letting go … just imagine where we could be, if the whip of fear had no more effect.
Now that – that is the right story.
Steel Caps to Uggs 