When It's Hard

Every job, every life, sometimes even every day comes with its own challenges.  Some are bigger than others.  Some are pretty small, easily dismissed.  This post is about what happens when the inevitable bigger challenges, the ones that threaten to rock you to your core, arise.

Here are the things I remind myself:

1.  This too shall pass.  No matter how frustrated I may feel in the moment, I will feel better again, probably soon.
2.  I can choose how to respond.
3.  I can't choose how the rest of the world responds.
4.  Listen to my inner voice.  The one that won't quit.  Sometimes it whispers, sometimes it shouts, sometimes it's hard to hear over the roar of the other voices (both mine and others).  Through all of that, just listen to my own instincts.
5.  Acknowledge the things that aren't perfect.  Not necessarily try to change them all, but just acknowledge them.
6.  Later, decide which problems need to be changed.
7.  Acknowledge my own limitations.  Recognize what is in my power to do, and what is not.
8.  Recognize that most of the time, most people are doing the best they can.
9.  Talk it out with people who support me.
10.  While I may not know what I'm going to do in the future, or when a certain situation arises, I have the tools I'll need to figure it out when the time comes.
11.  Choose gratitude.  Choose to remember the things that are great, right now, right here.

I also came across this article the other day that I really like, about how accepting your negative emotions actually leads to more happiness in the end.  I think that's what happens when you are authentically living your life.  I want to share a quote from that article with you that I found really amazing:

“Our contract with life is a contract that is brokered with fragility, and with sadness, and with anxiety. And if we’re going to authentically and meaningfully be in this world, we cannot focus on one dimension of life and expect that focusing on that dimension is going to then give us a well-rounded life.”

What do you think of that quote?  What do you do to overcome the inevitable challenges that life throws your way?

"What Will You Write?"

This is probably the most frequent question that people have asked me since I've started talking about wanting to write.  It's a fair question, and one I've been thinking about a lot as well.  I don't completely know yet, but my ideas are starting to take more definite shape.  I may not know entirely until it happens, and that's okay.  Even my first blog post looks different now than it did when I was imagining it before I wrote it.  I think that just happens when you write.  The words take on a mind of their own and flow together a certain way, and you know when it clicks.  That's what I love about writing.  Watching it all come together, and when it does- well it just looks effortless.  It's beauty.

Anyway, here are some of my ideas.  I love to write poetry, short stories, stories about all of life's journeys, stories that challenge.  I'd eventually like to turn some of my short stories into longer novels, and if I find some that I really like, maybe even a series.  I've recently found myself becoming more and more interested in writing children's novels.  But these are all just ideas.  The fun part is it can take any direction.

As I was writing the other day (starting another chapter in my first project, a collection of short stories), I realized that I can create worlds and people just the way I want them to be.  There is so much negativity in the news every single day that sometimes it can start to skew our perspective and we only see, and therefore emulate, all of that negativity back again.  But to create a world filled with people who experience love in a powerful way, who grow through their challenges and experiences, who have something to offer.  Now that changes everything.

Not to say that it will all be just fluff.  But it's a different paradigm, a positive way of seeing the world despite all of the setbacks.  Characters full of flaws, heartache, opportunity for growth.  Characters whose lives remind you of why life is so worth living.

An Invitation

Welcome to my new blog!  You are invited to join me on my journey to becoming an author, and this is the first step.  By following my blog, you get to watch me pursue my goal to transform from a burnt out attorney to an inspired writer.  Basically, you get an inside scoop, a front row seat to my life throughout this next transition.

How did we get here?  This has been a long time coming.  A really long time.

When I was 10 years old, I either wanted to be an astronaut, the president, or an author when I grew up.  Mostly I wanted to be an astronaut so I could do backflips on the moon.  I was in gymnastics and struggling to learn back handsprings here on earth, so I figured it would be easier to do it if I had a little less gravity.  Hence, my dream to become an astronaut.  Well, eventually I figured out how to do backflips here on earth, and this dream quickly faded. 

My interest in being the president was simply because I found out that the United States had never had a woman as a president, so I figured it was time that changed and I might as well do it.  Not that I really knew much about what the job required, or had any inherent interest in it.  Once I learned more about it, I quickly realized that I wasn't cut out for politics. 

However, an author.  Now that is something that has stuck with me my entire life.  As a child, I wrote and illustrated short stories.  I loved to read and explore all the stories in the library.  In college, my favorite classes, and the classes I did the best in, were the creative writing courses.  When deciding to pursue graduate school, I chose law school because I thought it was the best fit for my writing and analytical abilities.  Since then, most of my writing has been legal motions, memoranda, briefs, and court orders.  My reading for fun time has waned off and on throughout my legal career, and has just recently started to increase again thanks to a good friend.  Now that I am at a crossroads in my career, I am going back to that old dream.  The one that just won't quit.

Maybe I won't make it as an author.  Maybe I won't enjoy writing when it becomes my career.  And if that happens, then I can always decide to pursue something else later.  But for now, it feels good to finally give this dream my full attention.  To live my life the way I've always imagined.