I Was A Lot Further Out Than You Thought-Not Waving-But Beckoning For Help

Wanna know what I’ve been reading this week? I’ll bet my readers will be glad to know that I’ve been reading about writing.

See, I learned that I enjoyed writing when I learned how to use it to alter the course of my life.  I was right in the middle of a serious train wreck of a life when somebody said “you better start writing”.

I cain’t write, I retorted. See what I mean there? I could barely talk right, much less write. And besides that I said, or asked “what would I write about, anyway?”

“You don’t have a choice—if you intend to live much longer Mike. You must begin by writing in great detail every thing that has hurt you, grieved you, or angered you.”

He pointed out that as I wrote—the anger, grief and hurt would become real and personal to me again, just as if it were happening right that minute.

He told me to forget capitalizing, and punctuation, and “stuff” like that. He already knew how angry I was from the core of my being. He knew I didn’t have time to concern myself with learning grammar.

I guess that’s why he told me to cuss on that paper, and tell some people off. Kami told me to cry, cuss, get up and stomp; it didn’t matter, he said.

Just get it on to that paper. Get it out where you can look at it. Then bring it to me and we’ll get it all off of you forever.

That right there was a powerful lot of writing, I can tell you.  Not to mention that it was hard. Gut wrenching hard!

It took a lot of spiral notebooks, a lot of time, and to tell you the truth, a lot courage  to relive all of the life I had hated so much: all of the pain of living that had consumed my being.

I considered it to be the most difficult thing I had ever done, until I found out what was next?

Anyway, when I was all through I took it to Kami.  I went through it page by page, incident by incident, with him.

Even though I was once again reliving it all—this time I was not alone. I had someone to sit quietly and agree with me about just how much hurt I had been through in my life. We could see plainly all of the times I had been wronged, cheated out something, hurt.

When the tears were over at last, we went outside and set it all on fire. It was a somber time, to say the least, as I watched my history of anger and bad memories go up in smoke.

There seemed to be a quiet emptying and relief as I saw what was left. Nothing but the twisted and charred metal spirals of the notebooks. It was done, over.

I thought?

As Kami and I quietly drank hot tea, back inside, I heard this “Now I want you to get another pile of notebooks and write to me every single time you have hurt someone.”

“I want you to relive every physical and emotional hurt you have caused anyone in your entire life.”

I must take this opportunity to tell you that until I started that writing assignment, I either thought I had never caused anyone any pain, or that I thought I had a right to cause them pain.

As I took on this new writing assignment the light began to shine on my own short comings and behavior.  My writing assignment became more and more difficult. I was going to places within my being that I had never been before.

I learned that it is much more difficult to relive what I had inflicted onto another human being than what I thought had been inflicted upon myself.

But I continued to write, and write, as long ago memories came from what seemed to be nowhere. Memories of times I had hurt someone either physically, mentally, emotionally, or all of the above.

That writing was hard, much more than before. Right there is where I learned what most never know: that the pain I cause goes much deeper within me than the pain I thought someone caused me.

I learned that the real reason I was so angry was for what I had done, not what had been done to me.

Kami helped me see that God is inside of me, and he’s the same God that’s inside of you. He helped me to see that when I hurt you, I hurt God. When I hurt God, I hurt myself.

Anyway, that’s where I started writing. No structure, no form, no outline. None of that.

What I’ve always done on blogs and ezine articles is to start out with an idea in my head, and just go for it.

I write and write and write to get to the bottom of what it is I have to say on most of my post. Fact is that I write it until I begin to see a form taking shape and then I can start knowing what it is I am writing about.

In case you hadn’t guessed it yet, there are several problems with that sort of writing.

To start with, it usually isn’t that good to read. And that’s bad, because I would like to impress you with my abilities?

Another thing is that it takes me too long to finish what I’m writing about and get it published.

Because I would just as soon be a good writer as a bad writer, and I always like learning something new anyway, I decided to start learning to write better.