{ originally posted in 2017 }
The Thing?
That is when you know you can be successful in every other area of you life, but as long as you maneuver around IT, you will always feel like you missed your calling.
Because you walked away.
You didn’t even properly try.
Maybe a weak attempt, but you already knew beforehand that at the first sign of resistance or inconvenience you would drop it like a hot potato.
Little word of advice; nothing is worth trying (in fact I resist the word trying altogether) if you know you’re going to drop it as soon as things get more difficult. Because everything eventually will have it’s own hiccups and challenges.
And if it’s The Thing?
It will have even more.
Performance artist Marina Abramovic stated it most clearly when she said;
“Always do the project that scares you most.”
The only requirement for this advice to work, is that you view your life as a work of art. And that it fascinates you to grow beyond your fears.
I’m not saying to grow beyond irritation.
Or beyond boredom.
I m not saying to grow beyond “That is not for me.”
Or “I I don’t fancy that.”
I’m not even bringing in anger, or obsessions, or any unhealthy behavior you might nurture, into this equation.
I m focusing on fear. On that feeling of;
If this blows up in my face?
I m toast.
If this, fascinating, alluring, exciting thing, takes a wrong turn?
I collapse into the ravine along with it.
If I go on this life altering journey?
I may never return.
When I was a child I lived in Africa. My mother always warned me not to pick up large stones, because there could be scorpions and snakes hiding underneath. Years later, I confessed to my mother that we did turn the stones. And then we ran away, before we slowly crept back in, curious what we had uncovered.
My mother said;
“That’s okay. You were careful because you were warned.”
Just like snakes, it’s often enough to be scared. It keeps you from doing anything reckless. It is never meant as something to make you stop doing it altogether.
Last week I almost pulled a book from being published, because it scared the f*** out of me. Book one to seven were clear. They were written a long time ago. They didn’t have any emotions attached to them anymore. But book eight could blow up in my face, drive me into a ravine and get me lost, never to return.
The moment I realized that therefor book eight should not be cancelled, but in fact favored? That was a huge thing for me. That the fear had not been a sign that it should be pulled from publishing.
It had been a sign it was THE THING.
All I regret now is that I waited so long to publish the first books. I missed the chance to publish them when they were still warm, and I still felt sensitive about them.
A book can be well written, an evergreen or a bestseller. But only when it still has the fear and excitement of the writer attached to it, is it
THE THING
<3LSH
An Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living
That thing that scares the f*** out of you? It’s THE THING will be published in the first English book under my real name:
I M NOT CHANGING MY FUCKING SHOW
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