Looking Back: A Giant Shift in My Perspective

Once upon a time, I was a cold, unfeeling, lonely woman. One of the things that suffered from my isolation on a self-imposed cold, lonely mountain was my writing. There’s an enormous gap; a block of years when the only things I wrote were business related. When I think of all the years I wasted, I almost want to cry.

“Almost”, because I know the time wasn’t wasted. It was time spent experiencing. Granted, most of what I experienced was lows, but to be honest, there were some incredible highs as well. How could there not be with a pair of precocious, energetic twins to raise on my own?

The excessive amount of time I spent in isolation from Humanity is serving me well nowadays. It gives sharp contrast to the life I know live, and as such, the words I write and the feelings I share. That perspective is teaching me to be for others what it took most of my life to allow others to be for me.

Even so, it still amazes me when someone opens up to me, sharing deeply personal issues; mental health, family suicide, depression, or simply life’s challenges. It wasn’t too many years ago I knew everyone around me only on a superficial level. Not because people were too self-involved and self-contained, but because I was.

Connection is the Essential to Writing

I am beginning to understand why I wrote so little for years. It wasn’t a lack of angst in my life. I didn’t lack for the pain and misery so inspirational to other writers, artists, and musicians. Instead, I was missing a key factor which would have given my writing dimension and depth. I had neither the desire nor the ability to connect with other people. Without that connection, anything I wrote would have been one-dimensional and from my own decidedly limited perspective.

While others wrote about pain and loss with an understanding of having loved and been loved first, my perspective had loss and isolation, but no deep, abiding love to make losing someone truly touch my heart and the hearts of others. Unlike many, I had to learn that part, and I credit a lot of people who have nurtured the tiny seed inside me until I found the lost little girl I’d shoved into a dark corner. Refusing to acknowledge the little girl was a refusal to acknowledge something many women like me have subjugated and ignored.

I believed to the depths of my warped and twisted heart that I could give all the love I had, but didn’t deserve to receive it. I wish I could say I’m alone in this belief, but the more I open up and share the person who spent years screaming soundlessly for release, the more women I meet who at some point in their lives felt, or still feel the same way.

Learning to Receive Love is the Hardest Lesson of All

We give and give, draining ourselves completely, yet still find a way to give more, never realizing the solution is allowing ourselves to receive as easily and unreservedly as we give.

Yes, doing so opens us up to more of the trauma and misery people close to us are experiencing, but instead of having the sharing and caring drain our limited reserves, we instead fill our own as well as everyone else’s. I learned a very important lesson. Love given and received is a bottomless source. It is never depleted because the acts of giving and receiving continuously replenish the supply.

Feeling empty, drained, and yes, depressed is the result of giving all you have and never allowing anything to come back. It also means what people do share is not coming from the deepest, most vulnerable part of themselves because, in essence, you’re not a trusted place to pour out the heart. I know now it’s the open, honest, unqualified sharing of the heart’s deepest hurts, and most intense love as well which gives us that feeling of inclusion, of belonging.

Belonging isn’t so much what others bestow upon us. It’s what we allow ourselves to receive. Without our willingness to receive what others give freely, they feel their gifts are rejected, and will ultimately stop trying to crack the hard shell we’ve built around ourselves. Until I learned how to receive as well as give, I felt others were rejecting me without cause. Now I know the rejection and isolation started with me.

Flat Life Equals Flat Characters

The life I was living impacted my writing more than I realized. I couldn’t write a three-dimensional character when I lacked the experience of being one. And because I had no experience myself, what others showed me was only from their own surface and never touched the deepest parts of themselves. When it came to creating a character people could love or hate, but could relate to on an emotional level, I was as a blind person trying to describe the color red. I had more emotional attachment to characters in books I’d read, and typically the attachment ended when I read the last page and closed the book.

Most of my life I’ve heard “write what you know”. It turns out, I couldn’t write about people until I learned how to be a whole one myself. I couldn’t define a variety of characters until I was allowed to see the entirety of the people around me instead of the superficiality I’d been giving and receiving.

The last 20 or so years of my life have been fuller than the first 40 in so many ways. Yes, there’s been unimaginable pain. I’ve had a multitude of challenges I had inured myself to for decades. And yet, the last third of my life has been so much better than the first two-thirds on so many levels.

Making the Most of My Next 40 Years

Even now, I’ve neglected my memoir and my novels yet again for a long time. I had to find the missing piece before I continued. I had to put the puzzle together; all the pieces and parts I’ve been gathering for the last 20 years. I had to realize it was time to start fitting them together and see the patterns they made. More, I needed to see how they could be arranged in many different ways, creating a veritable shadow box of images from which to draw the characters I’ll share. Even the ones from my own life; my own memories of the way things were, and are.

I’ve set myself an ambitious goal; to get at least 2 weeks worth of posts written and scheduled. This post puts me halfway there, but time doesn’t stand still. By the time you’re reading this, I want to have 6 more written, and as I’m writing this on Tuesday night, I have 4 days in which to do it, or, as my analytical side would say, 1.5 posts per day. The good news is, it means giving the writing muscle so long left to stagnate some much needed exercise.

About the Author

Sheri Conaway is a writer, blogger, Virtual Assistant and advocate for cats. Sheri believes in the Laws of Attraction, but only if you are a participant rather than just an observer. She specializes in creating content that helps entrepreneurs touch the souls of their readers and clients so they can increase their impact and their income. If you’d like to have her write for you, please visit her Hire Me page for more information. You can also find her on Facebook Sheri Levenstein-Conaway Author.

Be sure to watch this space for news of the upcoming release of “Life Torn Asunder: Rebuilding After Suicide”.