My sweet cousin wrote a novel, and the day that we had planned to meet up to cheers before I left for Australia, she received her first rejection letter.
I could feel that she had sadness and that she felt heavy, and then when she told me, I sort of blurted out, "OH, that's great!" (Definitely too enthusiastically for what the scenario called for.) And she gave me this quick, short glance like, what the fuck? By happenstance, I had just read a book about writing as I am also an aspiring writer. And the book said something like: if before you started your writing career, you knew you had to create, produce and be rejected ten times before your big break, would you approach your writing differently? (The War of Art is the book) And i just thought that was brilliant and and the timing of the fact that I had just read that sentence that day. I was so excited to share with a fellow writer. So, basically, you go willingly. You go willingly into the years of doing the most work with no reward. You go wilingly into the days where you think you should quit or you throw your third manifesto in the garbage this week. You go willingly into the uncomfortable, trusting that you will get what you seek if you just keep focused on it long enough. So, I am applying this frame of reference to my writing, (#obvi) but more importantly, I think the lesson is that this might be very well true of my real life as well. I think I am on a grand mission here. I believe that my soul is here to do some really big things. But how different would the journey be if I went into it knowing that I would have my heart broken over and over again. That people would hurt and let me down. That I would try path after path only to have to retrace my steps and start over. I think so often we get discouraged because things don't work out the way we want them to. Or they don't work out in the timeframe we thought they would. So, we give up. But if you knew ahead of time that your journey required X number of rejections, or X number of lost loves, or X numbers of failed attempts at starting your own business, and only THEN would you achieve the success you desire, would that change the way you started on the path? Would it change the way you viewed your "failures"? And it would it change the way you cultivated your ambition when it gets hard?? Because at the end it, are they really failures if they are required to fail in order for whatever is next to come to your path?? I want to live my life with such a trust that no matter what I come across, no matter how many tears I cry, how many people let me down or break my heart, I KNOW that each one of them is there to help me along my way. I will thank my "failures" wholeheartedly because they put me one step closer to my Victory. And I have no idea what my Victory is... but I KNOW it exists. And if my soul is here to do BIG things, then I better believe it's going to be met with some resistance. My job is to toughen up and keep going.
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Writer, Dreamer, EncouragerI use language to empower, excite and illuminate souls. Archives
December 2019
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