Letting Go of Conventions

Since in my professional writing life, I follow so many rules -- and in general have found myself lately getting pretty hung up on writing structure to the point where I fail to experiment as much as I should -- I decided to create this blog as an attempt to give myself free range to write with less rhyme and reason about potentially nothing in particular. I'm sure I will not be able to resist the temptation to challenge myself with a variety of themes and overly-plotted-out opinions, but I'm going to try harder to be less concerned with my public life as a "professional writer" and be more concerned with being an actually interesting writer that indeed has some personal thoughts every once in a while that sometimes aren't polite.

I also really want to challenge myself to be a bit more laissez-faire and not take myself so seriously, because that is definitely one of my biggest faults. I was not always like this; I used to fake-vomit up pudding in college at the dining hall when friends would request that I "do something" to get irritating, unwelcome dinner guests to stop talking. In adulthood, I care much more about what people think, even thought the Internet and other invasive inventions have more often than not blurred my personal and my professional lives. Still, I worry too much that I will not be fantastic at everything, so I hold back. As an example, once upon revealing that I could tap dance to a close friend while standing in front of a bar in Williamsburg, I was asked to do it on the spot, in front of a large-ish group of strange onlookers. I refused adamantly and got fairly angry about it, as if the casting director for a Cole Porter musical looking to give me a million dollars to dance in the chorus was going to be standing by and hanging his/her head in shame at the sight of my soft shoe. Sometimes -- and frankly most of the time --people are not going to expect me to have a fully-rehearsed song and dance number (or the equivalent, depending on the situation) ready to go at a moment's notice.

Maybe something about habitual, unbridled creative word release in a public forum will improve my attitude and bring me back to completely un-self-conscious comedy. A dear friend of mine said quite recently (Thanksgiving weekend, in fact) when describing something she had admired about me all these years that I really don't give a damn what people think about me. I think this might be partially true, and could likely be fully true again with a little effort. A status message I posted on my Facebook profile yesterday (not real life, I realize, but sometimes biggish ideas happen there anyway) as haphazard philosophy made me think about myself in more detail and what would make me a much happier human and maybe return to some of my more appealing roots:

"Sleepless with a crowded headful of thoughts from a terrible day,but resolved not to let fearless hopefulness and risk taking go out of style. Our lives will likely be a series of epic failures, but so what? If we're lucky, they'll be hilarious."

I can only hope this is true, and that even the failures bring some degree of personal success ... or at least really great inwardly-directed Schadenfreude.