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?

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.

How TM Allows You to Take Control of Your Life.

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Brian B Baker

I’m four months on with TM and the main thing I’ve noticed is my ability to recognize myself.

Before TM I didn’t know who I was, what I wanted or whether I wanted anything, this includes to continue living.

I was in the darkest place I’ve ever been in my life, and that scared me enough to try something which some people I know saw as radical, Transcendental Meditation.

I’ve missed a couple of times, mostly because of conflicts with timing, airplane trips and being tired as hell.

Those times were when I noticed a difference, I’m not saying to stop doing it to see what I’m talking about, but I could tell the difference in my temperament and overall mood.

With TM I discovered who I am, what I want and where I want my life to be in a few years.

Before I was under the delusion that I could get myself out of any funk I got into, this includes depression, but I was wrong. My depression was the worst I’ve dealt with and because of that, I had to try TM.

In my first session I learned more about myself in those 20 minutes, than I had in the previous 38 years.

I found peace, for the first time in my life I felt like I could make myself better than I’d been before.

Along the way I’ve learned that focusing on myself, my writing and my family were more important than any distraction caused by my day job.

The delusions I had about my life before TM have been put into perspective as I didn’t know who I was or in what direction I was headed.

The delusion of our life is that it gets better without help, it rarely does.

I discovered my life is more than the person in the body, it’s about the way I want to help others, the things I want to teach others, like TM, and how I want those I care about to discover TM and its benefits.

TM has changed my views on life, family and creativity, but I know I’m on the correct path now, and that’s changed how I run my life instead of it running me.

TM allows you to take control of your life in a way you never thought possible.

Paperback Landmines, Barbwire and Flies

Posted on July 3, 2014 by Brian B Baker

The part about writing that always confuses, the writing.

We write, because, well…it’s what we do. There’s nothing I can see myself doing for the rest of my life, definitely not my day-job. I don’t want to be slinging drinks at 50.

I have books by King, Maass and one or two by K.M. Weiland, not to mention Strunk & White.

These books have gathered at my desk for an intervention.

They’re not in a pile, they merely litter my desk like paperback landmines.

One or two sit open, they’re pages alight in streams of fading sun filtering through the blinds.

I see a few of my notes about this, that or the other and find myself drunk from the new knowledge of outlines, plot and character dissection, which oddly sounds like some medieval torture.

I’ve never been fond of these books, but my writing, well it’s on the verge of discovering what landfill flies actually eat, don’t ask.

The headaches are back, the stress of not getting things on the page, when I desperately need the release.

The little synapses are firing, but there’s not much to fire into when the stories are stuck in a no man’s land surrounded by paperback landmines, gas canisters of regret and bullets made of that little gooey stuff that comes out of bugs when you squish them.

I see the books, they’re little bugs telling me to do things I don’t want to do. Outline, plot, character dissection and a myriad of other little things my heart doesn’t want, but my mind keeps telling me, “Listen up, it will help.”

My heart is torn between what my writing wants and what my mind knows needs to happen.

I’ve read all the books, done some of the exercises, but that doesn’t feel like enough tonight. The pillow calls, but I’d rather wrap it around my head with barbwire than leave the desk, because I’m a writer and I have to write.

The writing doesn’t come, it spurts and spills like fresh blood from an artery, cascading across the page in large arcs.

The arcs begin small, but then, something amazing happens…I begin to write.

Brian B Baker, Writer

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