Rewrite!

Recently I was having a chat with someone about life and how it never quite turns out the way we picture it to be. More to the point I was talking to my therapist about how life wasn’t fair and how I didn’t like it. First off, in not so many words she told me to grow up. Secondly, she told me if I didn’t like I should do something about it. Specifically she said, “You’re a writer. Change your story.” No truer words were spoken at that moment. But who knew it would be so DAMN hard to do!

I have no problem making things up in my head, hell my imagination still runs away with me most of the time. But to change the story of my life seems to be unreal to me. In my mind this whole concept is like watching Star Wars and waiting for Darth Vader to say to Luke, “Luke, I am your father.” Instead he says, “We’re not related in the least. SUCKER!” Or to find out Julia Roberts recovers in Steel Magnolias, it seems like that sort of improbability. But this isn’t a movie or a play or TV; nothing is written in stone or solved in thirty minutes. This is life and we can change it if we want. There’s a great line from the musical Aida where Aida says to Radames, “If you don’t like your fate change it! You are your own master; there are no shackles on you. So don’t expect any pity or understanding from this humble palace slave.” Those words ring through my head sometimes. They’ve become like a mantra really, something to remind myself I can make a change if I want to and things could be worse.

No one ever said change was easy. As a matter of fact if history has shown us anything it can be EXTREMELY difficult! But also looking at history, what I need to do is nothing compared to what the people at Stonewall, Kent State or Tiananmen Square had to go through to change the course of their lives. People stood their ground and literally put their lives on the line promote change. In other cases change is forced upon people, with the oil spill in the gulf and the recession (not mention Katrina a few years back) people have had to change whether they liked it or not. Families had to move from their lifelong homes, give up their livelihoods and see their communities literally destroyed in a weird twist of fate they were forced to change because others refused to. So why do I feel it’s so hard for me? Unfortunately, most of us have been born with a recessive “narcissistic” gene that only allows us to see our own troubles and magnify them to ten times their normal size. Some of us have been born with out and some of us have to learn to overcome this disability. This is what I’m trying change, to move forward and write a new chapter for myself. Of course now I face the scariest thing any writer has to deal with…staring at a blank page waiting to be written.