Reaching A Better Place

In the last article I explained that the positivity of an answer isn’t what makes you content, but that having an answer that you believe in does. A person is more likely to get unhealthily attached to really positive answers and can even be taken prisoner by them as their minds refuse to let in the other possibilities for fear that they will hurt them.
It’s better to be really comfortable with the accuracy of a neutral answer than it is to cling to a positive one knowing it might just be too good to be true.

Looking back, I’ve faced a lot of frightening questions, but it took me a long time to face many of them. It’s a shame I didn’t face any of them sooner as there have been many different far-reaching benefits of doing so. Read through the examples and see if any of them have been your own questions.

Liberation

From the age of about nine I wanted to become a novelist. I loved to write stories…well…short-stories which I actually never finished. And I’d only write stories every once in a while – writing was less fun than video games, after all. I received plenty of encouragement from my parents, teachers and even friends. And what’s more, it was warranted: my (mostly incomplete) stories were crap, but it was advanced crap for my age.
This continued on through my childhood and eventually, after some particularly strong praise from a teacher when I was 15, I felt ready to write my first books. After about a year I had written my first short-story anthology and it was so God-awful bad. After three or four years, and three drafts, I had finished a 90,000 word novel. It, too, was such crap.
But the point is that by 17 I had written hundreds of thousands of words and also spent many hours reading articles on writersdigest.com and the odd ‘how-to-write’ book – learning about the practices of novelists and the rough workings of the fiction publishing industry. At around that time the frightening question appeared.
‘Is it possible I’m never going to become a published novelist?’

I was very young, sure, but creative writing was still my life’s work, my oldest dream and the one field which I’d always been skilled in. I had other dreams and career back-up plans: becoming fluent in Japanese, running my own business (and even at one point becoming a barrister, ha!) but they weren’t as rooted in me as writing fiction. That question threatened everything I thought my life stood for.

It came up (and got louder and more insistent as time went on) because I was finding more and more that I didn’t want to write as much as published authors do. I initially scoffed at the idea of writing every day – there was no way I wanted to do that. And then I started to find that most professional writers do, and I uncomfortably felt that I had to. Not only that but setting a daily/weekly word count was a sensible practice, and I did so, only to find I really didn’t want to write for more than an hour a day. Given how slowly I write that was a really meagre number of words.
Perhaps the biggest doubt is that I just don’t like reading fiction that much. I read the occasional novel, but I prefer stories in films and TV series and even in certain video games. Novelists are ideally, of course, book worms. Just like directors are film buffs and musicians are audiophiles.

70% of my time spent writing was unpleasantly difficult, 29.9% was flow and 0.1% was bliss (or extreme joy, if you prefer). My disinclination to read a whole lot also meant my skill level was almost stuck on a plateau.
Eventually I faced the question at about 19. It wasn’t a particularly grim moment as I’d known it was coming for years. I answered the question: ‘yes, it’s very much possible I’ll never become a professional novelist.’
And at first that was that and I didn’t feel much of anything about having answered the question – nothing positive and nothing negative. But without realising it I was becoming more liberated. I no longer felt I had to read x many novels per month or read author interviews or feel a little tense every time I heard some bad news or anecdote about the publishing industry. I could do whatever I wanted again. The future no longer felt guaranteed, but then it never had been. I had depended on something false, and now I had discarded it.
I still wrote every now and again, when inspired (which any published writer will tell you is not how you get successful) and I thought more about studying Japanese and where that could take me. Most importantly: the daily discomfort of fighting my way through hundreds of words, not knowing what to write half the time, was over.
Not long after that Sam was round one day. Having recently read Rich Dad, Poor Dad I was enthusiastically extolling the benefits of passive income streams. The subject of blogging came up (I think I raised it as an example of passive income) and Sam suggested we make our own blog. Well, it wasn’t something I’d thought of doing…but it didn’t seem like a bad idea at all.
I found blogging was a lot more fun than writing stories had been, and nine months and dozens of articles later I’m still doing it. The funny part is I’m still writing creatively, of course, only it’s not fiction. Answering some frightening questions will liberate you even when you didn’t realise you’d been trapped.

Contentment

‘Maybe there isn’t a God.’
I don’t need to go much into this as I’ve already covered it here. The scariest questions can be personal and very minor in relation to the universe, or they can be huge.
Answering the massive ones may not have a very specific effect on your life, but those answers will probably have the longest lasting effects. God, the possibility of an afterlife, the meaning of life and the universe – you’ll likely have to do a bit of reading before you can get to the bottom of it all, but it’s worth it. Even educated scepticism is better than ignorance.

Growth

And, of course, answering your frightening questions will help you grow. Accepting that I may never get a novel published widened my scope of the world that bit more, reinforced my understanding of the lack of guarantees in life and made me realise that I’m not meant, or born, to do any particular thing with my life. Often you’ll grow simply through recognising and releasing unhealthy attachments to ideas and beliefs. That’s what tends to happen to me.

The Ease of Acceptance

I think you’ll often be surprised at how easily you accept the dreaded answers, too.

Often you’ll have already found you’ve half-accepted them. That was the case for me and authorship. It’s hard to think of an important question without answering it at least partly before you dismiss it, and the more it keeps occurring to you the more often you’ll give it tiny bits of consideration before you can force it down again.

When you really think about it, the answer usually isn’t as bad as it sounds. For a lot of people death is largely unacceptable. I once heard that Freud, probably Sigmund rather than Anna, theorised that religion was built largely as a means for human beings to deal with death. That makes a lot of sense to me. But when anyone truly faces the possibility that death is the absolute end they’ll find it’s a comfortable and likely truth. As long as you’re living life well it’s not something you’ll look forward to, but if life is a rollercoaster then death is just getting off it. Would you want to ride a rollercoaster forever? Even your favorite one?

You may well have made the answer that you’re holding at bay a lot scarier than it actually is. When I was 14 I became attracted to other boys my age. No-one, including me, saw this coming. I’m not a hairy-chested beer-chugging football-watching imperial ton of manliness, but at the same time I’m not camp or effeminate. I behave and think in a traditionally straight male manner and always have done…meaning I’m clueless about fashion, think white and crème are the same colour and avoid films starring Meg Ryan. So, unlike some of my questions, this was not something I’d half-accepted the answer to. This was quite a shock.
And 14 is not an age at which most boys can deal with this. I prayed I wasn’t gay, ‘please, God, don’t let me be gay – bi is fine, bi means I can still marry and have children and not think anything is ‘fabulous’.’ I had nothing against gays, but the idea that I was one was mortifying.
Fortunately I was, indeed, bisexual and was attracted to males and females for years – I even slightly preferred females, and that was fine by me. No-one would ever have to know I liked guys. But as the years went on the scales were shifting. After a while I liked both sexes equally, then guys a bit more, then a lot more, then even more and eventually I realised I wasn’t attracted to girls anymore. By then I was an adult but was still uneasy about being gay – I had been perfectly comfortable being bi. It took a while for me to face up to the question I had buried when I was 14.
When I finally did, at 20-years-old, nothing terrible happened. I came out to my parents, and nothing terrible happened. It was all such an anti-climax: I had made the possibility that I was gay far scarier than it actually was.

So, those are some frightening questions I’ve had to ask myself, why I’m glad I answered them and why such questions are good to face. But what about you? Are there any questions which you’ve been avoiding? If so, isn’t it about time you answered them?

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