‘Don’t you just love it when you see something or read something and it just transforms you somehow? I don’t know how it happens, but all of a sudden you just feel this underlying shift inside of you. Suddenly you are able to do things that you did think you could do five minutes ago. It’s like this power just starts to flow through and fills you to overflowing with things you didn’t even know were inside of you.’ -Me 5 Sept 2019
I wrote the above after I saw this amazing quote several years ago and it just spoke to me.
“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”
~Cyril Connolly
That really resonated with me at the time, as I had been really struggling with writing. (As I always am, one way or another, lol.) With what to write and feeling like I needed to write something that resonated with people. It got me feeling like I had lost myself in my attempt to focus on everyone else. I didn’t know what I wanted to write. I thought about blog posts, books and short stories, although I quickly decided against short stories for the most part as I would rather read and write a full length book than a short story. Do you have any idea how many short stories I’ve read that should have been a book? Enough that I don’t want to read anymore unless I am looking for inspiration.
I got so caught up in my overthinking what I should write about that for a long time a lot of my writing never made it into the public eye. I worried so much about what to say and how to say it that many times I ended up saying nothing at all.
I wish I could say that this quote completely turned everything around for me and I suddenly started producing all kind of content. But that wouldn’t be true. Partially just because I ended up having surgery again just a couple of months later. It did however, stop me in my tracks and got me to thinking. How much of my potential was being lost in the overthinking of my own mind? I was so worried about what ‘everyone’ (who is this magical ‘everyone’ anyway?) would think about what I was writing about and whether or not it would speak to them that I was losing the time and energy I could have just spent writing what was on my heart.
Today when I stumbled across my note and this quote again, I realized what an influence this mindset has had on my life. Too many times we are told by YouTubers or bloggers that we have to do all of this research to see what’s ‘trending’, rather than writing about what fills our thoughts and hearts. Maybe we aren’t all called to follow what’s trending. Maybe it’s time we let our hearts lead us down the path that God has called us to, even if we have to blaze our own trail.
It’s interesting, I suddenly noticed that Blaze Our Own Trail has the acronym B.O.O.T. How appropriate for a post about having to create our own path as we go. And just like a pair of brand new hiking boots, sometimes the path that we have to carve out for ourselves is uncomfortable, even painful sometimes for awhile. Sometimes the new paths that God calls us to are difficult and require a breaking in period before they really become comfortable for the long haul.
This really resonates for me. Not only have I been working on forging some new paths in my writing and trying to build a YouTube channel, but I have also begun navigating some new life challenges lately. I am hoping to be able to move in the next year or two and it’s looking like that will really be into some uncharted territory as I try and find somewhere to live that will cause less Type 2 Inflammation flareups. Which may look like moving to another state. For sure I could see that being uncomfortable and difficult, to say the least.
Is there an area in your life that is boots on the ground, forging a new path? An area where God is calling you to walk through something that although new and possibly exciting; is also a little uncomfortable and painful? Please share in the comments below how we can pray for you today.
Image created by Mel Seeley in conjunction with ChatGPT.
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