Urgent!

I’ve been struggling with a sense of urgency towards the very craftmanship of my writing. I guess it’s penmanship? Anyway… so I want to get better at writing, but there’s a few avenues that I’d like to tackle, blogging with a better voice writing fiction with a better voice and also getting better at writing poetry/raps. But it feels like I’m tackling too many giants at once. Someone once said that it’s better to triple down on one thing instead of being half way pregnant in 12 different things. (I think it was Gary Vaynerchuk who said this.) I feel this is very true for the sake of faster progression in one craft.

Though at least one thing is clear, everything I’m interested in progressing has to do with writing, just three very different forms of writing. I love being able to bounce back and forth through the three mediums, however, it seems kind of distracting, as if I’m not getting very far in each medium because my attention or focus is divided. Which is kind of starting to drum up self doubt. What’s funny is, I’m starting to be ok with how I’m progressing. I think the main key to progress within one self is ultimately to fall in love with the process. I think a common pitfall for most people with building mastery in a craft is they probably tend to be a little too hard on themselves, and spend too much worrying about whether it will take them somewhere in the end.

I think the most important part is enjoying the growth as you go along and approaching it like a child. Where the sense of growth is more intuitive and less about whether your progression is impressing enough to outside perceptions. Letting your self breathe and express without worrying if what your doing has worth to other persons or entities. This approach is freeing in a way. Though, I would like to say that, while this method or whatever you wanna call it, is freeing it also doesn’t mean that one should expect growth without persistence, however it is just an opinion formulated by personal experience.

Yo I almost sound intelligent! Woop. Happy Friday y’all. Do what you love, love what you do. I finally get that expression!

Personas

Most of my life, I’ve always seen myself in other personas. I’ve always come up with a nickname to escape my personal identity. I never liked that person. I associated too much pain in that person. I always wanted to escape reality as much as I could. Whether it was through video games, rave names, dj names, aol instant messenger, Instagram handles, whatever have you, and in a sense I still do. It’s completely ingrained into me. Mostly out of a space of fear initially right, because for some or maybe even a fair portion of us, we just want to be someone else or something else.

Because, why should I have to own the name that wasn’t even mine to choose, why should I, like the name my parents chose for me, when they weren’t even present for my childhood or most of it, anyway? Even today right now, though already I’ve accepted my name, and it took a whole 3 decades to do so, I still don’t really use my given name. But that’s besides the point, maybe some of you agree?

Personas have been a powerful thing for me, it was a form of medium for vision. For character building. Before I became a DJ I already said in my mind I was, I even went as far as printing out business cards that said I was a DJ on it and passing them out even though I had no idea how to DJ. But it totally manifested into reality in my life.

I use this now in my current days I create a title for myself, I call myself a writer but what do I really know about writing? Perhaps slim to none, but as I call myself that, I begin to see it and I begin to believe it, and as I’m going through the process it starts to become solidified into the essence of my being. It starts to flower into my intuition and creative space. I start to manifest the creative people working in the same sphere. There’s probably books written about this method, and explained in great detail.

I’m not learned in the mechanics of how or why creating a persona works for me, but through actual experience this has been true for me. Maybe this could work for you as well? Who do you see yourself as?

Progression

So I’ve been doing this thing lately, I learned it from a podcast I was listening to. I’ve set three alarms on my phone and labeled the alarms as actual affirmations and little reminders to be creative throughout the day. I have one set at 7 pm PST, it says, write a blog post, write a poem. Of course I should probably adjust this timing maybe? I don’t always follow through with it. As of late though I have been able to come through, I think probably twice.

So anyway, I think in the last blog post I was talking about my friend whom I went with to this so called “Mountain of Truth”, anyway it was here that I found my passion for writing, but I hadn’t even known it yet at the time. To be honest, now that I really think about it, my writing stemmed from when I was a child. My mother, wasn’t actually what you would call the run if the mill mother. That in itself is a whole entire other blog post, maybe a few. Anyway, the earliest memory of me really getting into writing was probably when I was an 8th grader, and my mother at the time was going out with this guy who worked at the casino where she was working at. So they were hookin up or whatever, but I didn’t know that at the time.

I come home from 7th grade spring break and she tells me to pack my bags, and that we were going to Vegas. So I pack some clothes and left all my things. We never came back to California.

Story for another blog post.

So fast forward, I’m in Michigan, living in an apartment with my mom and her bf or whatever the fuck title he held at the time. And well I didn’t have friends, and we didn’t have much money let alone afford a tv, eventually they got one and working cable even. But before that I had nothing but a notebook and a pen, and comic books that I borrowed from the library that was a 3 mile walk away. I would walk there every day just to log onto the internet for an hour and then read comic books because back then I wasn’t into actual books. Shame because nowadays its harder to find more free time to read a good book.

Its like Jim Kwik says, “…its no longer self-help, its shelf-help.” Lol so lately I’ve been trying to get my friends to read more and its not working. I guess they gotta want it for themselves bad enough to make that change.