FIRST DRAFT
Nothing will ever take my writing from me ever again.
Especially not me.
SECOND DRAFT
Writing is my first love. And luckily, she loves me too. And that bond is forever.
THIRD DRAFT
When I healed. When I had the moment of integration. When integration transformed to individuation. I understood the symbols and symbolic meaning deep enough to invent, label and inhabit them.
My repressed childhood love of magic and energetic creativity – the child.
My repressed young adult bravado and charm – the rogue.
My unnamed adult ability to dispense wisdom, what I assumed was growth beyond those repressed parts – the wizard.
My mind created symbolic meaning and feeling, and let me feel the acceptance of these aspects fully conscious. And since then, I’ve lived fully conscious of all of it. There’s no repressed self. There’s no shame. There’s no anger directed back at myself.
There’s just me. And the connection, the thread that bound those metaphors of my psyche that I could hang on to, was made of paper, and ink, and words. Writing. The Child wrote. The Rogue wrote. And boy, did The Wizard write.
I wrote through all of that. I punished myself by taking away that thread. One last important lesson to learn, that there was no crime to punish, just mistakes and learnings to accept. I thought I stopped because I burned out. But it wasn’t true. That was a hard thing to accept. I self-sabotaged a novel that August Wilson was going to help me publish. And I kept repeating that pattern of punishing myself by trying to unbind that red silk thread. But it never left. She stayed. And now I know with certainty that she’s a beautiful muse, that shapeshifts, and can become a thread, an angel, a spell, and she smiles even when she thinks I’m not looking at her.
And the thread came back. And the thread never went away. And the thread is always going to be there. And me, The Writer, the shaman of life’s ekphrasis, the master of Chinese Heart Boxing, the guy with the jokes, that’s me.
The Writer. And to understand this and accept this and hope that this can move beyond art into a profession. To work for this. To be willing to do what it takes. That’s another lucky gift.
FINAL DRAFT
Born a child, grew into a rogue, until magic made me a wizard. But now I understand and accept my shaman nature, the thread of the universe that tells me the truth, that I’m a Writer, the ekphrastic master of Chinese Heart Boxing, and always will be.