Shout down the voices

HI,

I'm sorry that it has been nearly a month since I last posted and I've been giving some thought as to why it has taken me so long to post again.  I have thought of and written several post in my head over the last month.  I also have been writing almost every day and working with my artist on the mini-comic.  I could say that I have been just too busy to write a blog.  But the more I thought about it the less true that statement became.  The truth of the matter is that I have had a bad case of "I'm not good enough."  The more I delve into the line of think the more I see how that has been a theme for my life.

I have always loved stories.  I love reading them, I love hearing them, I love watching them and I love making them up.  When I was a kid I played with action figures for way longer than most kids do because I didn't just have them have a fight, I weaved long, drawn out melodramas of love and betrayal with my toys.  I mimicked the kind of stories I was reading in Chris Clermont's run on Uncanny X-Men and Roger Zelazny Amber Chronicles.

But with action figures it was all safe, because it was all for me alone.  Writing and creating is different.  It's meant to be shared.  Other people will see what I have done and judge it.  There is elation and validation if they like it and crushing sense of defeat and worthlessness if they don't.

For me unfortunately, too often and for too long, defeat and worthlessness are my starting points.  It's been that way since I was in the first grade.  I was born with several learning disability including Dyslexia and Attention Deficit Disorder without Hyper Activity (I even got screwed out of the extra energy benefit.)  This makes writing well changing for me.  I can craft in my mind what I want to say but the execution is flawed.  Thanks to the way my mind works many times I will make the corrections mentally without even realizing it wrong on the page.

I was diagnosed with these learning disability in the first grade after a particularly scar incident where we were given the rather straight forward task of writing our names.  I took my red colored pencil and putting it the large lined sheet of paper, the kind with all the dotted lines to help kids tell how high the different parts of letter should be.  I took my time and with my shaky not yet developed handwriting I scrawled 'MOT' on the paper.

I was proud of myself.  I got all three letter of my name open the page and they were all inside the lines.  I even spaced it out perfect so it took up the whole page, nice and big so everyone see.  And everyone saw, when the teacher, whose name is lost to my poor memory, held it up to show the class how bad I did.  She gave it as an example of what not to do.  Then she called me stupid in front of whole class.  Even not twenty-eight years later I can still feel the sting of not just the words, but the laughter that came afterwards.  It's probably why I've never been wholly comfortable with good nature teasing.

My mom heard about it when I came home.  She and my Father did what any good parents would do and raise holy hell about what had happened.  The teacher was asked to retire.  My parents then spend a good deal of time and money (of which they had very little) and had me tested.  Once the nature of my disabilities were discover, the school district send me to an adjacent ^[1] school district which had a class for kid with problems.  Unfortunately that mostly meant kid's with behavioral and emotional problems.  I was often sent out of the class room, because I was the one who was behaving and need to get my work done.  Most of the time is a blur of emotions and fragmented memories.  Mainly I know I felt sick and like I was not good enough and embarrassed.

I still feel embarrassed anytime I make a mistake in what I have written.  This morning before I went to the gym, I saw a friend had posted a picture of themself with the sonic screwdriver the 10^th Doctor used and the caption A Sonic Screwdriver…Somebody help me.  She had been watching a ton of Doctor Who lately.  In response I took a picture (or several to get it just right) of myself with 11^th Doctor's screwdriver and wrote "I'm the Doctor and I'm here to help."  Or that what I intended to write.  What I actually wrote was "I'm the Doctor and I'm her to help."  Later that morning at work, while I waited for a system to reimage, I checked the Facebook app on my phone and saw someone had like my comment.  That's when I saw my typo.  I have felt mortified about it ever since.  I'd give my big toe, right big toe, the one with the non-mangled toenail, to have the ability to edit Facebook posts and comments.  I wish I could add the extra 'e' back into 'here.'  All day I have felt worthless for a stupid typo I made at 6 in morning before I went to the gym.

It's those kinds of feelings that have been a little louder in my head lately.  I think that is the real reason I have trouble posting often.  That and I haven’t been cooking that much lately.  Food posts are always easy because they are mostly a list of Ingredients and pictures.

I just finished Wil Wheaton's book 'Just a Geek.'  It's an excellent read and well written.  In it he talk about his blog and how he because happier with it the more he allowed himself to be personal in his writing.  Reading the book made me wonder if that is a direction I should explore with my blog, or should I just keep it as solely a record of what I make?  Please leave a comment here or on the facebook post where I linked to this blog entry.  Are these kinds of personal stories interesting?  I have a couple more rolling around my head.  What I'm thinking of doing is dedicating one day a week to write a blog post.  Hopefully now that I'm writing more I'll post more.  I'm trying my best to beat down the feeling of not being good enough.  To shout down the voice of insecurity in my head and produce more stories and writing.  Every day it's struggle.

Before I leave, now that I set the mood, I want to give a plug for my friend Johnny Destructo and his new etsy store.  He makes awesome art and posters.  There is an old movie theater near me and he designs new poster for the old horror movies they show on the first Friday night of the month.  Click here or his name to check out his store.

Thanks for visit my kitchen

T.

^{[1]  I wanted to use a different word here, but I can't spell it well enough for the spell check and it not on the list of spelling words I keep on the a sheet posted next to my computer.  I wish it was the only time I had to limit my word choice in writing this blog post.}