Epiphanies

Last week, I came to a sudden and startling realization: I subconsciously sabotage virtually any attempt and building routines, and I know why. Somehow, for some reason, I am still rebelling at the Marine Corps, six years after I last put on the uniform. Six years later, and I’m still lashing out at forced and/or group exercise by nuking any effort at getting into shape before I even start it. And it’s crept over into stuff like writing, because sometimes that’s just a little too much like work. Enough so that it’s given me several crises of whether or not I’ve got what it takes to be a writer. Not because I lack the work ethic, or the love of writing, but because somehow… the Marine Corps actually kind of broke me, mentally.

What a crazy, almost vertiginous realization.

Shortly thereafter, I came to a different realization: that as much as I wanted to tell people about that in this blog entry, I figured that it might be better to save the sorts of insights and catharsis that come with such dramatic changes in understanding who I am and how I function for the fiction. Not that you would ever see this exact realization, or the scenario behind it in something I write, but that there’s stuff there worth mining. If there’s ever an opportunity to mine some of that catharsis for a character’s own moment of sudden realization, it might be more impactful if I didn’t spoil it, so to speak, in my own blog.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.