Well not Once Upon a Time, but Once Before Covid, and not in a Galaxy Far, Far Away, but in my own personal galaxy, I came up with an idea.  I had been working, kind of sort of, on a young adult novel, when I was struck by an idea.  I wanted to write a companion book to my book Thinking Positive: Take the Journey into Positivity.  Then covid struck and my life was turned upside down.  I foolishly thought, as a teacher who was now working from home, that I would have PLENTY of time to write.  I was wrong, so, so wrong.   I worked more hours than I could ever imagine recreating curriculum, and reaching out to kids trying to help, begging them to do work and just making sure they were okay.  Summer brought more of the same.  Things changed a little bit in the fall.  We were still remote, but it was more structured, and I found that I did have more time, but something had happened.  It was a not good something.  I started listening to the voices in my head.  You know those voices, the ones that tell you your too fat, or stupid, or ugly, or what you just said or did was foolish.  THOSE voices.  Gotta say, I’m not a fan of those guys.  Anyhow, those voices were telling me I was wasting my time, that nobody wanted to read anything I was writing, and that I couldn’t write.  Well, I’m actually not going to disagree with those statements.  But you know what?  I didn’t write my book for anybody else I wrote it for ME!  If people liked it, that was great, but I never once in a million years thought I  was going to sell a million copies.  But I started listening to the voices and they convinced me that I couldn’t do it.  That I couldn’t write.  Logically, I know that is not true.  I can write, I may not write well, but I can write, and I have 39 short stories, and novel length works to my pseudonym – and what’s more, people actually like them.

My new companion to my Thinking Positive book was going so well when I started.  I was literally flying through it – and then I got to the chapter on re-framing your thoughts, and I could not write that chapter.  At all.  It wasn’t writers block, it was worse.  It was that pesky voice in my head, it kept droning on, louder and louder, and it talked over any writing related thoughts I was having.  And it was ironic because I should have been re-framing those very loud thoughts and used it to my advantage.  And honestly, that realization just came to me this weekend, along with a few others which may be blog topics for another day.  My point in all this rambling is those negative voices in our heads only have power if we listen to them.  As hard as it is, and I KNOW it’s hard, you have to be louder than them.  When they start, tell them to stop.  Seriously, say stop in a loud firm voice, or clear, or let go.  I’m going to try and work on my book tomorrow, and when those voices start telling me  I can’t, I’m going to tell them I can, because I can, and so can you.