My Best Find?

That might be hard to say

I don’t think I can name my best find yet. I might have found it. I can’t say for sure. I’m still looking though.

But to response to a prompt, I’ll go through my list of things. And that seemed like a good place to start. Things, no that fizzled pretty quick. Maybe places would hold my idea for my best find, so I started looking there. Nope that fizzled out too, pretty quickly as well, I might add.

I went down memory lane and started thinking a woman might be just the thing. That held promise, about 2 minutes longer than the previous topics I investigated. It turns out that not a single woman made the best of anything except in the women topic itself. That was interesting.

How about pets? Surely there must be a pet that ranks up there as my best find. While that list is pretty short and there is more than one in the running, I have to keep looking for be sure.

I’m in a writer’s group? Naw that’s not it but that held a little more energy than the others I noticed. I sat with this for a minute and it turned out not to be the writer’s group itself, but it was the writing! Imagine that.

In the middle of 6th grade, I still remember an event as though it was happening right now. My teacher liked my writings then and her habit was to review them however she did and hand them back out and then the dreaded words shook my soul, “Jay”, she said, “please come to the front of the class and read what you wrote for this assignment”. My mouth went dry; I got more than a little nervous and I mean it was an immediate response! I got up and walked the 20 miles to the front of the class, turned around and started reading. I didn’t want to read it at that age to my classmates. That was a huge risk, right? Besides I was writing for me mostly. But I started to read and about halfway through this whole paragraph I wrote, something changed. Not in the writing per se but in me and it showed to me in the writing too. I felt the change. It didn’t feel anymore. There were words on the page, but they didn’t feel to me anymore, so I stopped writing, period.

I wrote class assignments and did those types of writings, but I blocked me from my writing for a long time. And then, a few years ago, I started to journal. Just journaling, took out pen and paper and just wrote with no punctuation, no paragraphing, just writing whatever. A few years of this “practice” I learned to call it, and then one day I took a few pages and started reading what I wrote. I found some common threads, a cohesiveness and there was a story unfolding in it.

I started writing for real, stories mostly, little blurbs here and there, fiction and non-fiction, poetry of a sort though not following a particular style, just me writing. And the funny thing was that it stirred the fire in me to write and it grew every time I wrote. It fired my imagination, it fired a hidden drive, it fired my creativity. It just fired me up about writing again. So, I wrote and then I found substack and that gave me a platform to write on. It also gave me readers who are not shy about letting you know what they think. It’s all expressed in a positive way.

Now I write, expanding pieces I thought had some merit. I deleted some, for sure, there is still the critic in here. The moral of the story though for me; when you doubt yourself and your ability with words, don’t choke it out of existence too. Let it rest, take a breath, step away, get some coffee. Come back and look at it from a different angle, you might be surprised what comes through.

My best find is my writing for now. Though Jack, my border collie is neck and neck. I’m still a hopeful romantic though. Maybe a woman can make the grade before I go and do something silly. Like leave this plane of existence and then come back to do it all over again because I missed an important lesson. I’d really rather not have to do that if you know what I mean.