Confidence and Adversity Shouldn’t Fight

I had that moment again.

The garrulous absurdity to actualize my station in life out loud, in front of other people. A verbal check-in/confirmation: I am at where I planned to be this time two years ago. I am on schedule.

The result of that mis-slip of affirmation: a reminder someone else hasn’t got it all figured out.

It’s not a competition, homie. Nor is it your role to turn on the shit spigot. We should take moments to celebrate other people’s achievements. We should swim in their wakes. It’s a terrible aspect of American social conditioning: if someone is happy, do your part to shut it down, immediately!

Two months, people. My first fiction novel is available to you in TWO. MONTHS. My project management skills have gotten me to the point of final editing towards full publication, but good ol’ gumption got me to proclaim that I exist in an artistic vocation, full time. That’s the kind of woman I felt I deserved to be right now: an artist in bloom.

So perhaps my liberty in proclaiming a collected sense of self-worth was too outrageous, too ostentatious. I felt it erupt, I felt the knowing of the thing erupt from my mind and develop into spoken word. I expressed joy, and in that expression, the reaction was…oh, I’m not there yet.

There is a way to get there, though. Jump on the shoulders of giants. Swim in the same channels as those who care to venture in the same waters with you. But don’t self-loathe about it. Self-celebrate about it. Have self-faith, you’ll only develop pure confidence from there.

Today I looked on my blog page and saw the countdown tally had shifted from 3 to 2 months and I feel excited about it. I feel relieved, really. I am finishing what I started, what I set out to do. And when that person folded inward, when he admitted, ‘I’m not there yet,’ I said, it’s ok. I’m here. For you. Let me slingshot you in the direction you want to go. Let me be your muse.

And then I asked, ‘What is it I can do to help you on your journey?’

He’s still thinking about it. But it’s good that he’s thinking about it.

Two quotes I recently mentioned in conversation, one acquired from The Dude himself, the beautiful Jeff Bridges. The other quote is straight from Douglas Adams’ final book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Omnibus, Mostly Harmless. Both were applicable in the actualization I experienced today:

[Jeff Bridges]

“I think that it’s not only the same fight that you have with your spouse, but it’s the same fight that everyone has with everyone—everyone. And basically the fight is: You don’t get it.”

You don’t get it?

“You don’t get it! What is, for me, being alive. And what you do to me. And the thing is: That’s true! I don’t know how you feel, what it is to be you. But that’s something to kind of celebrate and respect and honor! And that’s, that’s what we have in common. None of us, none of us, get each other. So you have to just be with that.”

Read More http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/201310/jeff-bridges-cover-interview-october-2013#ixzz2mI1i6w00

[from Mostly Harmless]

You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know can’t be added to what you see and what you know because they are not the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know because that would be to replace you yourself.