Add up.
I keep telling myself that as I slowly start tracking my hours for my MFT license.
I also reiterated that to myself and an old friend that I had the pleasure of catching up with today over coffee and lunch in Hayes Valley.
We hadn’t seen each other in years and it was like old times.
And yes.
We’ve gotten older.
And older is all I’m going to get.
I don’t mind.
I like myself more and more.
I feel like I am entering my prime, not exiting it.
I have so very much to live for and I am so grateful that I have carved out this life here in San Francisco.
I don’t have to think about how long it will take to get my hours, I will get my hours, it will happen, the time will pass and one day it will be a story that I tell someone else who is beginning the process.
Things take time.
Sometimes things happen quickly, they fall into place, and there is a beauty and grace to it.
I am often reminded of what a very wise woman said to me years ago, “if it’s meant to be you can’t fuck it up and if it’s not meant to be, you can’t manipulate it into happening.”
My career path is like that.
For the longest time I tried this and that and the other to make it as a creative.
A writer.
A poet.
Maybe a screen writer, I certainly had and do have some interesting ideas for movies, but nothing panned out.
Oh.
Sure.
I have this, my blog, and it’s panned out fantastically, I throw my stuff at the screen in front of me, I process my day, I get things out, I figure it out mostly by not figuring it out, but by taking the creative action of just showing the fuck up here consistently.
But.
I have never really made it as a writer.
Not that I’m not a writer.
I’m fucking writing right now.
I’m good.
I’m not great.
But I would hazard that I am better than plenty of folks that do get published.
Perhaps it’s that I don’t understand how to submit, or that I don’t submit the right stuff or that I am not as good as I believe, it’s beyond me is what I’m saying.
One day it may not be.
Today it is and suffice to say.
I don’t give a flying fuck.
I love writing.
I love poetry.
I love expressing myself.
And this is my medium.
I don’t write for an audience.
Oh.
Sure.
Sometimes I may be addressing you, sometimes things sneak in and there’s a message between the lines, I won’t say that there’s not.
But I do really do the writing for myself.
But it’s not a career.
The dividends that have paid off are vast and varied, the people who I have met because of my blog, the things I have done, the experiences I have had, especially when my blog was a little more public, were and have been astounding.
Too many to list here.
However.
Most of the time the pay off has not been cash money.
In some round about ways, though, it has paid off more than handsomely.
I expressed to my friend today that I am often a bit ridiculed, or teased, ridiculed seems a harsher word than the poking fun I get from my cohort, for how fast I can write papers for class.
It really hasn’t been too much to sit down and knock out a big paper in one sitting, in a few hours.
If I have an idea of what I am writing, if I have done my research, taken good notes and done my reading for the class, I can crank it out.
I can do that because I do this, consistently, my rate of typing is fast.
I haven’t timed it in a long time, but it does seem that my thoughts fly from my brain and to my fingers quite quickly.
I will publish, I know that.
I will publish poems.
I will publish essays.
I will publish my memoir, although it needs severe re-writing.
It may not be the book I originally wrote.
But it will have the skeleton of the manuscript, I am sure of that.
My writing goals have not been met, but they will be, I am sure of that.
When isn’t important.
And I will publish psychology papers.
In some odd sort of twist that may be where I find my first publications, I don’t know exactly, but I do think that I will find that as an avenue for my work.
I have had great reviews of my school papers and I think with some tweaking I could probably submit some of those papers to psychology publications.
Who knows.
I just know that it will happen.
And I’m fine with the process being what it is.
I don’t have to manipulate it into happening and I can’t fuck it up.
Unless I stop.
Which right now seems impossible.
I have stories and stories and stories.
All the words.
There are so many.
So beautiful, like birds on a wire, like the scattershot of sunshine sparkling from the froth of waves, like the way love endears itself further into my heart when I am least expecting it.
My friend and I parted ways and I reflected as I got on my scooter and headed over to my job, my day job, that I have it pretty motherfucking good.
I do.
I have discovered many things about myself in the dozen or so years my friend and I have known each other and they all seem to have played beautiful and rich into the hand that I have been dealt.
I am on the path and in the place I am meant to be.
“You look amazing,” he said.
And you know what?
I feel amazing.
I think that shows.
Happy.
Joyous.
Motherfucking.
Free.
Auntiebubba 