So today was the start of a new agenda & goal which is technically an old agenda & goal. Confusing, I know.
I did write today, scrapped every bit of words I typed last night and started over. Gave me a word count of only 200 plus today. I stared at my word count chart in disbelief. Yes technically I wrote more than 200, I can’t erase last night’s word count. Again, I stared at my word count chart in disbelief. I threw my hands up in failure.
I cursed myself for being so hard on myself, knowing I have to write every day. I haven’t written every day. In fact, I took almost two months off from writing. I knew the muse wasn’t going to be ready just because I was.
I took my 200 words and was going to be happy with them. I wrote and that’s all that mattered right?
Wrong. Oh so wrong in so many ways that I wasn’t even aware of it until I read a friend’s blog.
My friend Stephen is fighting cancer and before he started chemo he was telling me about the idea to blog about it. It was something he wanted to do to let others know what was going on and that it was something he wanted to share. I thought it was a great idea. I’m a huge fan of writing your feelings down in a journal for personal reasons or in a blog for the world to see. I think it’s therapy that’s relatively cheap and the feelings are bottled inside like some festering sore. My aunt died of breast cancer that had spread through her body and her bones and I can’t tell you what she went through except for her hair loss and mastectomies. My cousin-in-law, Randall, died of leukemia and again, I couldn’t begin to tell you what he experienced either. I knew that through Stephen, I could finally understand what my aunt and cousin went through.
I finally got to catch up on Stephen’s blog called “Fuck You Cancer” tonight. I downloaded all the entries into my RSS feed so I’d have something to read at home since I don’t have internet. Let me tell you something, I felt ashamed that I was yelling at myself for words when he was fighting against one the toughest things in the world cancer. As I read, I became inspired by Stephen. He’s not letting chemo get him down. He’s not letting the weight loss, nausea, pain, and so on keep him down. He gets up every day and forges on. He blogs, almost daily sometimes more, through it all.
If a man who is too young to fight cancer can write through a battle that’s as he said “getting sick to feel better,” then I could suck it up and quit bitching about a mere 1200 words a day, not finding time to write, and so on.
If Stephen can write while taking chemo treatments, then the least I can do is remember that and let him inspire me while I’m writing. From this moment on, when I write, I will think of every word count not as a goal that cannot be reached, but as a universal healing power that I can send towards Stephen to beat cancer, to say fuck you cancer.
He’s inspired me to write with a purpose to heal, just like the blog he has will help him heal.
Thank you Stephen. You’re an amazing soul and you’re inspiring. You’re not letting Satan’s hell keeping you from sharing yourself with the world.
