Writing to Help Others.

Posted on July 31, 2014 by Brian B Baker

We disguise who we are from ourselves. We do this to keep others away, keep ourselves happy and to, hopefully, chase the demons we deal with.

The disguise we use often depends upon the nature of the demon. Childhood trauma is a big one, but hiding from things we don’t want others to know, this keeps us happy, but also maintains the disguise.

Keeping up the illusion gets harder as we get older, and creating ways to deal with our demons may lead us down a darker path.

A path filled with pills, bottles and cutting, but writing creates a forum for our demons. It brings them to the forefront of who we are, and more importantly who we strive to be.

Writing, like meditation is our outlet and with that outlet we discover we’re stronger than we believed possible, even if we must discover it through our fiction.

Fiction is the one outlet which we can put a character in a situation and possibly work through the issues we’ve dealt with through them.

The process is difficult, but leads us to a different path, one devoid of pills, bottles and hopefully cutting.

Finding the right story to get through our trauma may be difficult, but keeping a journal of the trauma and story ideas helps.

In the pages of our journals we find an avenue to get through the life we had, have and hopefully will lead us to a better day.

Writing fiction helps us to find ourselves through our characters. It encourages us to get through another day and discover, we are better than we were told, and it helps us to know, just like our characters, things to get better.

They get better because we keep writing. We keep trying and we decide the disguise, though useful, isn’t necessary anymore.

When we write, we discover there are others who’ve needed the help. Who’ve waited for something to help them through their dark paths.

We write because we know there’s that one book which helped us, and we want someone else to feel the same hope we felt.

We lose our disguise because we no longer feel the need to hide from the world. We abandon the disguise, we get through it and we write to help others.

Death, Fear And Discovery…

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Brian B Baker

Death comes only when we’re not expecting it, for those are the times we don’t fear it.

These words have been making the rounds in my head for the last week. I’ve been doing TM for the past four months and though I no longer worry as much about who I am, I do feel myself worrying about others more often.

I’m not sure why, but I feel like there are things in this life which can be solved, not by weapons, callousness or hate, but by wanting to be better than we were yesterday.

Death it seems is something which I’d wanted to do, at least in the early part of this year. It’s now nearly August and I find myself looking to experience new things, take trips places and do the things I’d put off out of fear.

Life it seems is more important to me than it was a year ago, and this past year I’ve lost my grandfather and my wonderful Abigail.

My grandfather was something I saw coming; Abigail, I knew was going to happen soon, but I didn’t want it to. She’d sat by me through all my migraines and now, when I have one, I cast my eyes toward her bed, which still sits in the corner, and I find myself thinking about what a good dog she was and how she came along and helped me get through many things. I think that’s why she lived her 16 years, she was watching over me.

We often hide from the life we have, either in alcohol, drugs, depression or repressed feelings, but today I can honestly say I am living the life I want.

It’s an odd feeling to live the life you want, and not give shit what anyone thinks about you, or your life choices. I discovered that there is only person I need to make happy with my choices, myself and I don’t care for the thoughts of anyone else.

This year I found myself, I wonder what the rest of the year will bring?

Being Strong and Fighting Through the Demons.

Posted on July 16, 2014 by Brian B Baker

There are many days in our lives when we need to be strong for someone else; funerals, at times of stress and when someone is trying to recover from a severe illness.

Illness strikes all of us at times we wish it hadn’t. We learn about ourselves during those times, as well as about those around us.

Each person has a reason for being here. Whether it’s to learn, teach or to help. But we find in ourselves the things we wish we’d known long ago, and sometimes we discover the truth about who we were all along.

This truth helps us through the bad times we’ve struggled through, through the torment of our demons and the hazards of getting through life without knowing who we are.

There are many days in our life, but the days we struggle are when we learn the most.

We discover abilities to grow, to learn and to find in ourselves the greatness which has been kept from us.

The greatness we find in our struggle will keep us safe in the challenges we face and possibly help us be the person we were supposed to be before the demons took away our sanity and our peace.

Peace is the hardest part of our struggle. The peace we find in this life will guide us into the next and keep the demons away.

When demons come calling we struggle the hardest, not because we’re weak, but just the opposite. We struggle because of the strength we carry within us.

This strength feels like it appears out of the blue, but that’s only the demon’s trick.

The finality of this trick makes us believe we’re not full of the strength to live. To survive and to continue to thrive in this life we must chase the demons, rid ourselves of their presence and discover the truth; we’ve always had the strength to fight the demons, we were just unaware of how strong we truly are.

Today my brother is having surgery to remove cancer from his kidney. If you could, say a prayer for him today or wear red and white, it would be amazing.

I don’t do this for anyone, but I’ll do anything for my big brother. Love you Chris.

Finding Our Family

Posted on July 15, 2014 by Brian B Baker

Finding family obliges us to discover who we are, what we believe about ourselves, and whether our childhood was the way we remember it.

We discover our family not in the way we believe. It’s not through our blood, it’s through the connections we make, the lives we touch and how we understand the things we can’t explain about ourselves.

The things which make us who we are not the things which make our family.

We become who we are though our life because of the people we meet and those which have a positive effect on who we eventually become.

Family are those people who create the will to be who we want to be, not those who want us to fit into a mold.

The discovery of who our family is sets us free because of the reasons of being the ones we are.

We should let no family member define who we are, what we want or whether we love ourselves.

The love we have for ourselves should be more important than the love we have for anyone else.

Finding the right family helps us decide who we are and what we want.

When we get to the end of our lives and see the family we have will we say I wish I’d have done this or that, or should we say, “I’m glad I have this family.”

You Can Do Anything, Remember That.

Posted on July 10, 2014 by Brian B Baker

What happens to our lives when we stop believing we can do anything?

We see things falling through the cracks. Our lives stare at us from under blackened covers.

We hide from the world within a shadow of the person we want to become, because we’re afraid that person will rock the boat, disturb the world around us, or that we’ll fail.

The shadow is the person we keep ourselves from being for many reasons, but what is it about doing our lives justice that keeps us from wanting the life we owe to ourselves?

The sudden jarring jolt of pain we get thinking about the crashing waves upon the shore of the land we want to live in keep us in hiding, they keep us from doing the creative things, the things which make us alive.

Our life feels under the control of a puppeteer. They pull one string, move one small piece and bam, we’re lost, screwed and destroyed.

When we cut the strings, taking away the feeling of the puppeteer, we find the life we’ve wanted all along, but in cutting those strings we risk ridicule for doing something harder than those around us.

They tell you its impossible, tell you you’re nothing and laugh at you for trying.

These are the people whom you once called friends, they mock you, and do things which, if they were your friends, they wouldn’t do.

The cracks in who we are only visible to us. We see the damage caused, we know the pain we’ve lived through. Those around us only see the shell, we know the person living in the shell.

Who we are isn’t as important as what we do.

Our life is nothing without the failure or without the boat moving through the currents.

We fail, but the important part of failure is we learn. Without learning from our failures nothing happens, we repeat.

The shadow keeping us from being ourselves is nothing but our fear telling us things are impossible, nothing is impossible.

You can do anything, remember that.

Brian B Baker, Writer

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