Mirror Me

Sometimes when I get an idea to write about my thoughts and struggles about writing, something in my head tells me Whining again?

This goes to show a lot about me and about how I approach myself and my life. I am pretty mean to myself. For sure it has a lot to do with how I was brought up and the years that I was in the process of forming myself as a person.

I did hear recently though that there is an expiration date on blaming your elders, so I might just have to move on from that. I need to teach myself a bit of kindness before.

Other notions that have heavily impacted my development as a writer, were the fact that growing up the really good books, the ones recommended by everybody were books written by men. From Charles Dickens to Balzac, from Karl May to Jules Verne, or Thomas Mann to Dostoevsky.

There weren’t any women writers. Agatha Christie broke the ranks at some point, but she felt more like the exception than the rule. So, in my mind, writers were just men.

Please don’t get me wrong, I am not blaming them for anything, they are amazing, I am just stating a fact about how my reality appeared then. Must be said that we were not that English literature oriented, so I only heard about Jane Austen, the Brontes later on.

So, as a woman, I was destined to be a reader not a writer. By my judgement then of course.

Then, another notion I found very interesting was that most of the writers were struggling with their genius. The were badly adapted human beings fighting demons and hurting those around them for the sake of their art.

For a very long time I truly believed that to be a good writer you had to be a tormented soul. You could not be a well adjusted person, you had to fight and struggle and live in pain so you have access to those wonderful stories that you wrote.

Thus I had to be an unhappy man if I wanted to be a writer, as I was neither my fate seemed to be sealed.

Writing never gave up on me though. It nagged and nagged and it worked hard to have itself manifested in me, and over the years, no matter how much I tried to give up on it, it did not let itself be chased away. My own personal inner conflict.

Then time passed, as it does, and I got older, and happily, also wiser. But this wisdom came from reading, growing and paying attention to the world around me.

I now have many, and I mean many, women writers whom I thoroughly admire and enjoy their work tremendously. Some of them are alive and they give me the strength to believe in myself and think that:

… yeah, living women, with actual lives (dishes to wash, homes to clean, jobs etc.) can be great writers and actually are!

They embody a notion that I thought did not exist or was out of place in my world, and I am so grateful to them not only for their work which brings me so much joy, but for helping me build myself up and complete my life through writing.