Amidst the Madness of the World

It’s hard to focus on my goals with all that the world has been facing in this year. In the beginning, felt that this year would open a lot of doors that I couldn’t seem to find. In recent months, I’ve tried hard to push pass the news and social media, honing in on my craft, only I found myself in a cycle of spinning wheels on a stationary bike. My creativity was lost. I’d consumed myself with content regarding the current and past struggles of the world. Please understand, I don’t regret the time spent supporting the black lives matter movement or learning to keep my small family (my husband and I) healthy during the pandemic. I do, however, wish I could have given more time to my art, my goals, my reason for breathing, writing.

In the spirit of finding my way back to my craft, I started with conversation. I talked with family and friends about my writing. Through conversation, I reignited the fuel that burned my passion. I then read over pieces of my work, reminding myself that I create worlds with my voice, I tap into the emotions that are familiar to those who have read my poetry. I grabbed my notebook, that was conveniently lain on my coffee table in front of me, in it I wrote a list of goals that I wanted to accomplish and a year they would be completed. Was I possibly setting myself up for disappointment? Perhaps. Surely, there are some things on my list that may not happen, though I choose to believe they won’t happen only if I don’t put in the work. One of the first things I wrote on my list was “I will publish my poetry book in August 2020”. After writing that, I began working on my third novel. Well I’m sure that it goes without saying, there is no way I can complete a goal if I don’t work on it. Within my personal growth, I’m still working on how to focus my efforts, a superpower I don’t seem to possess naturally.

There is a poetry game I play with one of my closest friends. We come up with a word or two for each other to write about and then we have 10 minutes to create a poem. I always seem to write for 15 minutes. As time keeper, either my timer is broken on my phone or I keep mixing up 0 with 5 when I set it. Crazy how that happens. Once the timer sounds, we share what we’ve written. Sometimes the poems are horrifyingly bad (when we sabotage one another with a ridiculous word i.e. cauldron or kitchen) or we surprise ourselves and each other with an amazing poem. My reason for sharing that is because she called me this month asking to play this game when my focus was elsewhere. It because the catalyst in propelling me into working on my goal. I revisited my notebook and only had 2 months left in my personal deadline.

My focus regained, I had restarted my research on understanding how to self publish. I will soon write about the process and my experiences but, I am proud to say my deadline will be met. I’m working through some of the final stages of publishing a collection of poems through Amazon and I couldn’t be more excited.

Leave a comment about a goal you my have lost sight in. Let’s refuel those goals and get an extra push towards those accomplishments.