Answering the question: What does the future hold for you?
So, since I have tasked others in my group Fill the Blank Page to answer this prompt, I wanted to try to answer it myself.
Like most other humans on the planet I posted a list of New Years Resolutions for myself back in January.
Going into that list though; I knew what I was doing to myself.
I’ve always been a bit superstitious about predicting the future.
The universe typically laughs at my plans.
It does this by corrupting a milestone usually days before I achieve it.
Or maybe it just feels like that…either way, that’s always been an incredibly lonely feeling.
Going back over that list I can sense my own trepidation in writing it.
I knew what I was doing. I was trying to tell my readers:
Beware, don’t plan your future it’ll come back to bite you.
Make bite-sized goals you can easily fit in your mouth and chew!
Do the bare-ass-minimum so you can say you did something!
I wrote my resolutions list about how at the time I was so scattered “juggling multiple projects and making incremental progress in many different directions and it was difficult for me to pinpoint the exact progress I was making.” And how somehow that would all change for me if I just kept plugging away at my bite-sized goals. And I think I did that. I think I was able to do a little bit here and a little bit there and make at least a little bit of progress. I think. And we all know that very cool and amazingly fun thing that happened to the entire planet and not just me that changed everything and threw a monkey wrench in all of our plans.
It’s sad for me to share that feeling with other people; it is also sweetly vindicating and incredibly equalizing, I know, I’m a terrible person.
Heh…silly 5 months ago me. Thing is I’m still doing that. I have projects scattered everywhere. I have DIRECTION which is new, I guess. But still, I’m a mess:
I’m trying to write 3 novels at once. All at different stages of the writing process. Yes, I know I try to just focus on one, but then I neglect the other two and that’s just mean!
I know, Bad Amy.
I am building my platform. If you are in the group and are reading this blog that is very helpful but also very meta of you. But thanks! Obviously this is also still a work in progress.
I’m trying to reach out and build a community while simultaneously dusting off my old “Write and submit things to other people” bones.
And also find the right agents for my novel(s) and get up the nerve to actually talk to them.
I must say that having online resources to do that has helped. Instead of having to dress nice and take a train somewhere everyone shows up to the Zoom call without pants on.
Is the future going to be filled with me accomplishing all of these goals?
Maybe not. Maybe it’ll be filled with more fear and failure. It might even suck!
But you know what I’ve learned (incredibly) recently?
I’ve learned to embrace the suck and not beat myself up for it.
You know what though? I’m already kind of mad at myself. I needed to make content for my blog and here I am doing that. But I could have used this prompt and wrote a beautiful short story or an epic poem! But I didn’t. I accomplished something, it might not be what I wanted to accomplish but this is more than nothing. I still filled the blank page.
Yesterday, I watched Back to the Future through my 7 1/2 year old stepson’s fresh eyes. It was a red-letter day because he has actually started to be able to sit still through an entire movie and actually understand the plot. He’s bright and was asking all the right questions. But besides experiencing that milestone with him 🙂 I learned something about myself.
I learned that I never let myself change my mind. I learned that I put too much pressure on myself to accomplish SPECIFIC goals which is even worse than trying to accomplish pipe dreams.
At the end of the movie Marty is like “I never got a chance to tell you…” about the future. But he did. Doc was finally just not too stubborn to listen. Who knows when and where Doc was like “Eff, I better tape up that letter and read it!” but he did, he decided his life was in the balance and he needed to know what was going to happen to him.
You’re allowed to change your mind. You’re allowed to follow-through. You’re allowed to make lists of goals. You’re allowed to do nothing. You’re allowed to fail and make mistakes.
When you sit down at the page to write, you’re allowed to write the first thing that comes to mind every-time as long as it’s honest and it’s you.