Digging Deep

as i sit here tonight writing this, I am overwhelmed by the amount of sheer talent that there is in the world. people are incredibly good at things. but all people are good at different things, and the combination of people and personality and talent seriously astounds me.

I think about how far technology has come in the last 50 years, 10 years, even 5 years and the brilliant minds that have brought it to us in a way that puts devices into our hands that make us feel like we can do absolutely anything. and someone, somewhere had not only the brilliance and the talent to make that happen, but also the audacity and the drive. 

what if we all lived a little bit more like that? 

but i'm not just talking about technology. 

what if we all just lived a little more passionately and a little more shamelessly? 

what kind of wonders would we work in the world? 

Look at literature and art and music and media. The people that bring us the entertainment we love have to live with passion day in and day out in order to make that happen.  The difference between us and them is that they take their light bulb moments and they amplify the electricity and they work hard to add to the brightness. they eat, sleep, and breathe their passions. 

how many of us can say that we do that too? 

personally, i can't. I'm ridiculously notorious for getting inspiration and immediately shutting it back down. I turn that light bulb right back off and sit in the dark wondering why I'm not reaching my wildest dreams. 

do you see the deficit? because I finally do. 

There is nothing that I want more than to show people the depth of humanity.  Honestly one of my very favorite things in the entire world is seeing people's souls.  

por ejemplo. (that's spanish, i promise I'm not illiterate) 

who knows the People Code? It's that personality test that tells you what color most accurately represents your personality? you can be red, white, yellow, or blue. and obviously people have varying levels of secondary colors as well, but everyone has a dominant color. and i'm blue. WAY FREAKING BLUE, YOU GUYS. 

and that basically means that my motivations to do things are almost always emotionally driven. and oh buddy, ain't that the truth. 

so you can see why seeing people's souls makes me happy.  I thrive off of getting to the depth of the soul. i connect emotionally. and everybody out there that connects emotionally is like "uh, duh, everyone does", which is true, but it's not always the first way that people connect. 

A red, for example, will often initially connect intellectually. the emotional connection follows after an intellectual or a logical one has already been established. 

but a blue. a blue is different. the connect emotionally FIRST.  if there is no emotional connection right away, a relationship will rarely develop. 

so naturally, i'm drawn to things that heighten my emotions, that allow me to connect to the emotions of others, and, for me anyway, the deeper the better. 

i will never ever complain about sitting with someone and talking for hours about the things that set their souls on fire even if i'm not interested in the same things. because things aren't my interest. people are. and I will gladly sit and listen to someone talk about what they love because it makes me love them. 

and if I could have things the way I wanted them all the time, that would be what I do with my life forever and ever. I would create and enhance and portray that innate depth. 

and that brings us back to point A. 

what if I made it more of a point to do what sets my soul on fire? what if I lived a little more shamelessly? and what if I was willing to dig a little deeper to see that depth? 

what then? would I change the world? maybe not, but I'd certainly change me. and I'd probably change a few other people in the process. I'd certainly learn to love a little more perfectly, and I'd certainly learn to see the perspectives of others a little more clearly. and i'd live a significantly more fulfilling life. 

i'm committing to living a little more fearlessly and looking for the depth that inspires me to be a little more deep, myself. 

will you? 

Cracks

I'm generally a very contemplative person. I just think a lot. I ponder things deeply and I ponder them often. I end up having nights like this one where it's well past midnight and I should have been asleep hours ago, but there's somehow a million little thoughts just taking up all the space in my brain, almost as if it were to burst at the seams.  And yet, somehow, there remains inside me an infinite amount of space to think.

So I think about myself. I think about others.  I think about my friends, and the thousands of unique experiences that I've had that have brought me to where I am today. I get so easily caught up in the things around me that make me think more deeply, the things that make me analyze my own character.  One of those things for me, recently, was a book I just finished called Paper Towns, written by John Green.

I feel like I should preface my thoughts about the novel by first saying that I've read a few novels by John Green now. And the funny thing is that every time I start reading one I never have very high expectations for what I'm going to read. Which, in retrospect, is absolutely ridiculous, because I've never read a piece of work by John Green that doesn't make me feel like I've changed in some way.  I would never pretend to know what his writing process looks like because it has to be incredibly different for every writer. However, when I read the things that he writes, I come to a realization every single time that he gives his characters a depth that we rarely see in real life.

It's not that there's a lack of depth there, though.  It's not that John Green is some mastermind with extraordinary talent in inventing a personality with more depth than is realistic.  It's the fact that he's a mastermind in unveiling the depth that already exists. The characters may be fiction, but he writes of them in a way that makes them feel as nonfiction as any of us are.

Paper Towns masterfully addresses the idea of how people see one another. How we imagine the lives of others and what we see of them. There are two parts that were so emotionally and mentally impactful for me that writing a summary of them could never do it justice. Instead, I believe the words of John Green himself are more appropriate.

The first comes at a time when the characters are road tripping to upstate New York and they are imagining the lives of the people in other cars as they speed past them. After two of the characters describe what they imagine a woman's life to be like, Quentin, the main character comes to this realization: "In the end it reveals a lot more about the person doing the imagining than it does about the person being imagined."

Let that just sink in for a moment.
The way we imagine the lives of others does absolutely nothing to their character, but it--without a doubt--speaks volumes of ours.
Not long after this, Quentin is having a conversation with a girl named Margo and he says this to her:

"Maybe it's more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like, each of us starts out as a watertight vessel.  And these things happen--these people leave us, or don't love us, or don't get us, or we don't get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable...But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart.  And it's only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out."

Now here I am at 1:00 in the morning, wide awake, thinking about how many people that I really see and how many that I only see ideas of.  I'm sitting here thinking about how many people see me.  It makes me wonder how vulnerable I've let myself be to the people that I say I love the most.  Have I let them see my cracks? Have I let them in enough to see my light, to feel my depth? Or do I let them picture the idea of me? And I realize that it's much more of the latter than I'd ever like to admit.

Here's to letting more people see our cracks.  Here's to using our own cracks to see the cracks of others, and to see them correctly.  I can only imagine how much more rich and fulfilling my life would feel if I let people see my cracks a little more often. So I'm inviting you to do the same.  I'll share my cracks with you if you'll share yours with me.

Bridling Fear and Reinstating Passion

All the best writers I know are the best because they take raw emotion and they take real life experiences and they craft their language in such a way that it elicits those emotions in their readers. It evokes something inside of them that makes the reader recommit time and time again to feeling more deeply, to thinking more profoundly, to loving more soulfully.  It reminds them what it is that gets their blood rushing and what it feels like when their soul starts to soar. It's anything but words on a page. It is emotion crafted so carefully and so seamlessly that it forever changes the way the reader thinks and the way he feels.

All I've ever wanted was to be one of those kinds of writers. One that has a knack for taking a ballpoint pen and an empty sheet of paper and turning it into something that changes a life, even if it is only my own.  Powerful people have literally changed the world with their words. I don't know that anything I could say would have the power to change the world, but then again, why couldn't it?

***

It was never my intention to stop writing. It just kind of...happened. The thing is, though, that it was anything but sudden.
I could blame it on a lot of things. I could say that I don't have time or that I don't have anything to write about. I could say that I lack confidence, or that once I start writing something I wonder why anyone would even want to read it. And while all of those things are at least a little bit true some of the time, that's not really it at all. What is it that stops any of us from doing the things that we love?   I guarantee that it's not our love for those things.

I would be willing to say that the number one dream crusher in this world is FEAR. Fear that we'll fail. Fear that we'll fall. Or maybe fear that we won't. People are afraid of all kinds of crazy things.
I wrote once, about my fears. An inventory of sorts, I guess. It was an assignment. An assignment to write down every single thing that I could think of that scared me.
At the end of it, I sat there with literally pages and pages of ink staring back at me, my fears suddenly tangible. And then I realized a new fear. The fear that I'd let all those other fears hold me back.  But the realization of that newest fear also led the way to literally the most freeing moment of my life.  I'll never forget how liberating it felt to expel all of that fear that my being had held captive for all those years.
And then, I started over. I woke up the next day feeling like I could conquer the world. Seriously. I think I was the happiest then that I've ever been. I'm positive that I've never felt more fearless.
Somehow, though, over the last 4-ish years, fear has crept back in, and it has done a great job of just sneaking its little self into my life...again.

So what was it that really made me stop writing? Fear for sure. Fear of feeling too vulnerable. Fear of letting my emotion seep from my fingertips. And yet, it's that emotion that I admire so much in other writers.
They say that passion should be bridled, but I have learned that it should most definitely not be suffocated.  So here I am, declaring my passion over my fear; Reminding myself after far too long that I am stronger than any of those fears.

Disclaimer: (Are these supposed to go at the beginning? oh well...) I'm super happy! Life is peachy and I am #blessed. I'm not letting go of my fears because I'm unhappy with my life. I'm letting go of my fears because I was reminded that I don't need to be afraid. All I really need is a whole lot of faith and a little natural-born passion to carry me in the right direction. Everything else will work itself out. I believe that with all my heart.