What Can You Do On Your Own Behalf?

I have been BLOWN AWAY by the e-mails I have received in response to my posts about the pregnancy project and the job challenge.  I have felt SO MOVED by your stories and by your own loving encouragement to me.  I have felt so mixed about this here blog for the last couple of years, but I have to tell you that both writing these posts and receiving your mails reminded me TOTALLY why I adore this medium, why I want to continue, and why for now it is an essential tool in my life.  It CONNECTS me to a larger world and I feel SO LESS ALONE.  Thank you for that.  I feel we could WRITE A BOOK on the underbelly (no pun intended) of pregnancy stories, fear, artistic mothering, and the like.  Just knowing that some of you are out there in your own lives mothering, working, creating, feeling the fear, and living is tremendously empowering.  I wave at you from my desk and see you wave from yours.

I was searching through some work and rediscovered this piece I did for Skirt! Magazine a few months ago (I forget when).  I can't believe how well timed this was for ME to find it again.  I love getting a dose of your own medicine--I remember creating this and I believe fully in the ideas behind it--but at the time I made it, I was in a different place and happily immersed in knowing it.  I love how crisis or the intense experience of fear can just be like an INSTANT amnesia.  This job situation has at times made me feel like a bird who can only flail around in a cage.  Seeing this piece about making your own luck or at least acknowledging the power of action on your own behalf WOKE ME UP a little today.  In the face of fear there is ALWAYS something you can do on your own behalf.

I remember when I was riding the beast of trying to believe I could get my book published and following all the dead ends and just feeling it was NEVER going to happen and all of that HELPLESS VICTIM stuff that comes up when you feel fear and I had this little mantra that would leak into my worm riddled brain ever so often: What can you do on your own behalf?  There was ALWAYS something I could do.  Whether it meant working further on the book itself or sending out queries or writing a note to someone I admired or following up on an e-mail.  Action ALWAYS made me feel a little better.  One of those moments made me remember a literary agent who had contacted me awhile back and so I wrote her and guess who is now my kick ass agent?  (Danielle, YOU RULE!)

I have felt powerless and fearful, but there is always something I can do.  When I do nothing it perpetuates the feeling of that powerlessness, that other people hold the answers, that I am terminally screwed, that all the worms in my brain are right.  Don't get me wrong, this feeling is not an easy one to put down for me--I am quite ATTACHED to my fear messages--they are SO COMPELLING.  But no matter what SOMETHING can be done.  So I am trying and that is the best we can all do.  Even if it is to write these words. Even if it is to get up and walk out the door. Manifesting is faith IN ACTION.  What action can you take?