You are not your heroes.

This is important. Remember this.

You are not your heroes. They may influence you, they may inspire you, but you cannot be them. You are you.

This may seem silly , but a lot of otherwise talented people can bang their heads against the wall for hours trying to to regurgitate the perceived perfection of someone they admire, and that’s just no good for anyone.

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I’m using Write or Die lately, and one thing the stick of it kamikaze mode is teaching me is it’s good to have a braindump phase and an edit phase. The raw material stays locked in my brain if I keep going back to correct that one typo , and I make eight others besides. I need to get it out on the damn screen before I can whack it into shape. I often need a reminder of this. Another thank you to my mother.

Although I am shifting gears a bit,; instead of writing to a word count, I’m setting the handy dandy timer to 25 minutes, and then going. If I drop below a certain WPM (I’ve made the punishment setting fairly strict) I start seeing my words get deleted. I also hope this helps my WPM rating rise, because rather than a vague number goal, I have a time to fill, . And if it gets easy I’ve got a nice little bit more length to tighten that punishment line.

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The store I work at recently underwent a reno, and the boss is very adamant on housekeeping being kept up. I don’t blame him, he wants it to look good as long as possible. But if that one assistant manager tries to blame me again for a mess at 3pm, when I’m done at 7:30 pm…

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In the space of two heartbeats, I can go from calm to irate as hell. I worry when this happens, because part of me assumes having anything emotionally in common with my mother means I ‘m doomed to repeat her stupid. I often need to slow down and remind myself that it’s what we do with those emotions that matters.

And actually… it’s been awhile since I’ve felt myself getting hair trigger annoyed.

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I recently did my semi regular  contact pruning. It was a bit odd, casting off the people that no longer talk to me, or no longer talk. It was also heartening, seeing how many people I consider awesome also consider me awesome in someway.

Part of me is still too easily impressed with how I get a response from people. I was conditioned from a young age to keep a lot secret, to bottle things up so nothing in the wide column marked “embarrassing and wrong” was allowed to escape.

But as I get older, I realise this was a way for my mom to gain the freedom to treat my sisters and I as she wished at the cost of our freedom– freedom from scrutiny on the way she was living. If they didn’t see it, it wasn’t wrong.

We were reflections of her and on her to an unhealthy degree in her mind, the ones that she had to mould to be better versions of her. The nasty fact of our own thoughts and faults was not a concern. It was a useless, petty thing I’ll always hate her for. And I hate her even more for giving me reasons to use the word hate in reference to a person who should be the ultimate source of nurturing, a parent.

Eves if I never have kids, I still know that my eventual partner will have to have the ability to be a good mother. Because those, ultimately, are traits I expect in a good person.

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Although, interestingly, a friend did ask about my ideal woman. I had to confess, I didn’t have one. I’d like to think of it as a sign of maturity. Oh, sure, I have a range of features and personality traits I find sexy, and one or two things I ‘d want to be on the same page about, but I don’t have one solid image of who my partner must be. I have possibilities, and they thrill me.