An edited life has become unexeptable for me. What do I mean by an edited life? It’s a life in which I alter what I want to do because of fear. Fear has many faces and manifests itself in as many ways as there are people on this earth.
Don’t be fooled, small, seemingly unimportant edits can end up being a big fat road block on the path to ones best life. One seemly binine edit almost derailed the one thing I want to do more than just about anything, write this book.
You see, I can’t spell. It’s more than just a few words now and again. I just don’t see the miss spellings. It gets worst the faster I write, the more tired or distracted I am, and when I’m taking notes from something I’m listening to. It’s so bad sometimes that I can’t even understand what I wrote!
I’ve forever edited myself. Not sending little informal notes to friends, not doing applications or servays on site, all kinds of big and small ways that I avoided writing for fear my poor spelling would be exposed.
Getting anything out with correct spelling is tedious and always requires someone else to look over my words. Even with spell check I will still not catch all of my mistakes.
So as much as I love the written language, as much as I have always wanted to be a writer, I knew that with my ”problem” it would just never happen. People who can not spell are stupid. If someone reads something that has spelling errors, they will see the errors, not the words, not the message, that’s what I figured.
The argument that that’s what spell check and editors are for is a fine argument, however, I need to get an editor to see past the countless errors to get at the content. I figure I would never be able to kick the door open that far.
Trying to hide this “issue” my whole life has been exhausting. So I’m here to say… I CAN NOT SPELL! I CAN write and that’s what’s really important.
I will figure it out. I will find a way to get my book combed over again and again, so that all the words are spelled right so the message is not lost in individual words. I know spelling is important, my friend Dianne put it to me this way ”a miss spelled word is like a black dot on a white wall, I can’t help but see it.” because I want you to see the whole wall and not focus on the black dots, I do work hard to clean up my spelling (most of the time).
I do think I will have a page like this one in my book though. I will expose my faulty spelling gene in all it’s phinetic glory. I will show readers what my spelling really looks like in it’s bear naked form. This will be as strong an illistration as any to prove that an ”issue” need not stop you from making a dream come true!
So if you are reading this and you are not doing something you really want to do, if you are editing your life for fear of being exposed, knock it off. Show off your whole self in all its messiness. Come as you are and we’ll figure out what you’ll need to do to make a dream come true.
Rachel
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Re-printed from my June 21st post on
http://whynotrachel.wordpress.com
It would be so much less stressful not to have to apologies over so many things right!? It's not just spelling, it's how we look, and what we say, and how we feel…on and on.
Sure there are ways in which we edit that is important for us to function as a member of society. We just tend to take it too far. Almost everyone has self edited on some level for some reason. Why do we take this editing to a level that it starts to chip away at our person?
Anxiety, as many of us know too well, can become a great big life edit. Afraid to leave the house, or be home alone. Or things you have decided you just CAN NOT do cause it causes too much anxiety or tends to trigger an attack. Anxiety is in itself, us editing ourself.
And I don't say this to beat me or you up with that fact. I say it to see if there's anything we can do about it.
Rachel
Or rituals to be able to deal with the risk of an anxiety attack.
I like that anabsenthigh! It is true the faster I write the more ugly the spelling gets. And the more exited I am to get a thought out the worse the spelling is. I just can't spell, oh well. It's more about how I stop myself from doing what I love cause of fear.
What ways do you stop yourself?