I have to tell you what I’m doing. Right now, it’s 11:40 pm on a Saturday night. I just painted my fingernails a horrendously bright shade of pink. I almost need shades to look at them. I’m also checking out a few vacation summer rentals and transcribing an interview for an upcoming post on my writer site. I’m doing the very thing the literary agent I spoke to said writer’s should not do. Write on an impulse without organizing my ideas and preparing for them in advance.
Oh well.
I’m probably doing a million things wrong.
And there are probably a million reasons why I should just give up. {I just sat in the shadows of another blogger’s glory, for example. Hundred comments and tweets, this is not.}
But I can’t. Maybe it’s that stubborn streak in me. The “I was born this way” lyric playing in my head even before Lady Gaga was born. It’s the childhood defiance that got me in a fight with my elementary school friends for insisting that there should be a layer of brown dirt under the green crayon drawn grass. My teenage rebellion to not cut my hair or have my teeth extracted for cosmetic purposes. It’s just me. Me in all my imperfect glory.
I know there is a strong inherent desire in all of us to be a singular blade of grass. We want to both blend in with the fields around us and yet hope that someone will discover our uniqueness, the magic that makes us who we are.
I understand that feeling.
I know the scary, unsettling experience of doing something that feels right to us, but wrong to everyone else.
I hope you pursue that dream anyway. Not do it so it will prove anything to anyone else. Not do it to hurt someone or ourselves. But because being who we are and fighting for our dreams is so important, so vital that to not do it, to not listen to that calling is beyond unimaginable. It is not in our DNA to be like your neighbor, your community store cashier, your mother, father, uncle, aunt, cousin, best friend, etc.
I hope that this post, however you find it, becomes a beacon of a hope, a reminder to stay true to your uniqueness, to hold close what makes you different and to stay committed to the dream.
It’s there, dear friends. Even if we can’t see it yet.
Keep dreaming…