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?

For the sake of mastery.

Ever get intimidated by just the thought of writing something just for the sake of writing? I most certainly do. Especially when it’s for an online medium right? Because wow people might read this! Actual people? I dunno maybe. And then I struggle with the fact that people may not even read it.

Then my ego steps in and pretty soon you don’t write anything at all! Because my Ego says, “yo your writing can’t compare to all these people who’ve been doing it for years.” “Yo no one’s gonna read your entries, you won’t even matter to the billions of people who are already following those who inspire them.”

Eh I guess that used to my old mindset, not that I don’t revisit that same old mindset every once in a while. It’s just been so ingrained into my way of thinking, I think I’m still in the process of unlearning old ways of thinking and building on a new process of how I tackle daily life.

My ego gets fed though because I add these little tags to my wordpress post and random strangers who are building blogs or want to generate more traffic to their sites give me a sense of… well people digging the stuff that I’ve been writing about. It gives me a sense of validation in this world. My ego is fed just enough for me to keep posting.

But these days I tend to just not care about that aspect too much anymore, I just want to post consistently so that I can grow my self as a writer. Then maybe eventually I can post something worthwhile? At least to myself right, because every writer who spends a lengthy amount of time coming up with words to paint a picture on a page is probably proud of their own progress at some point. At some point you go, ” Wait wow, did I just write that? I actually sound a bit intelligent.” So your ego strokes your brains dopamine or seratonin or whatever happens that triggers some kind of pleasure zone in your brain, and your like dude let me re-read that again, and again, and again.

You start to want to share this with anyone who will even listen or read your most private most vulnerable thoughts, in high hopes you will get some sort of feed back, that in some way your writings, your musings, will inspire someone, or provoke some kind of feelings out of them.

I actually didn’t fully realize that there could be a passion in writing for me. It wasn’t until one of my good friends was going through a really tough battle with heroin and reached out to me, that for the first time writing became a viable passion for me.

My good friend was on a kick from one of the worst substances to get addicted to, and he came to me for help. I really didn’t know what to do, but I know I really wanted to help him out of the situation, so in a desperate attempt to help him out I hit up a friend of mine who was from the Bay Area and drove out to Concord near San Francisco, he offered us a spot to chill for a couple weeks!

We drove north to his house up in Hoopa Valley 5 hours north of San Francisco, my friend and I named that place the mountain of truth. There we ate packets of ramen noodles and baked potatoes for 2 weeks and created. After that day I also got into writing… I’ll finish this in another post.

Muse

The inner muse is hard to describe, it’s a growing process much like planting a seed inside your heart and mind and watering it with consistent thoughts of creative growth. Probably the most important part of that process is actualizing it on a medium where you can get your creative process recorded.

Perhaps that is actually what I intend for this “blog” of mine. To enter a space where I can feel comfortable sharing my inner most thoughts and at the same time increasing the depth of which I can write to fully express deeper sentiments. To find my voice in this busy world I suppose.

I say I am a writer, and a budding one at that, but most days I am conflicted on my prose and literary concepts? I always feel like my writing isn’t up to par enough with the writers around me, and that in itself is just a self limiting belief. Truly just getting out of the comfort zone and putting words on a page every day would be enough to form and sculpt my writing skills I guess.