Own Your Talents

I set goals for myself allllll the time.  All are serious in nature, as they pertain to edging me along the way to the life I want to have for myself, but they all vary in size and difficulty.  Examples:

• "Make small talk today."  (I despise small talk.  I'm actually quite good at it, but I prefer silence over forced conversation.) 
• "Don't look at the sidewalk/down as you walk."  (There's so much more to be seen!)
• "Walk slower."  (Not that I would EVER have any wishes to be confused for a slow-walker, but I tend to walk quickly and with an extreme purpose, and this sometimes means that I miss out on awesome things around me.  Coincides with above goal.)
• "Don't drink Coke for three days in a row."  (It's bad for me.  I know this.)
• "Write down one good thing about every day for an entire year in order to change how you view your life."  (YOU GUYS KNOW ABOUT THIS ONE)
• "Make a blog post at least once a month for all of 2012."  (Safari, s'goodi!)
• "Write at least one poem a month."  (I have very much exceeded this, to my own surprise.)
• "Own your talents.  No more hiding."

That last one is a toughie because it's a life-long kind of thing, you know?  It's not like I make it to the end of a day/week/month/year and think, "Phew, that's over!  Glad I did it.  Hope I learned something."  I have several goals that are constant, day-to-day efforts, and I do mean "efforts" in the truest sense of the word.  They can be physically taxing in how difficult they are for me to achieve.  They can bring me to tears when I feel that I've failed.  They can follow me for the rest of my life, because I can fail them, but I don't know that I can ever fully achieve them.  It kind of sucks.  But I seriously do feel that it's something I have to do, because I've made a commitment to myself to honestly be a better person, for the sake of others and for myself.

So, of all of my many faults and shortcomings, one of which I am most ashamed is how long it took for me to own my talents.  I like to think that I have (had?) some sort of talent-dysmorphia.  Body-dysmorphia is a real thing, in which people truly cannot see their own bodies for the way they actually are; they seem them as distorted and ugly and so on and so forth.  I feel like for me, I could never see my talents as things worthy of sharing and things of which to be proud.  To say I am smart, to say I write well, to say things of that nature, is to be a braggart, immodest, lacking humility, vain, self-centered, etc.  I could never share my talents on a wide scale because it would be, in short, wrong.  

It has taken me years to be at this point, where I can say good things about myself and what I can do with only minor flinching (kidding...?).  It's one of the most awkward things for me to do.  But it's okay.  Owning my talents does not make me a bad person.  Claiming myself for who I am does not mean I'm bragging.  Hiding what I do well and putting down any compliments is only doing a disservice to myself and to the God who gave me these to share, to increase the joy of others, when possible.  And I hate thinking that not owning who I am is doing exactly the opposite of what my God intended.

There are so many levels on which I have convinced myself that I ought to be ashamed, and it's exhausting.  It's even more exhausting for me to put those old self-views aside and lay claim to my talents.  But it's the kind of exhaustion that I think will be worth it in the end.

So my goal to claim my talents and own what I do started small.  Publish a couple of poems on Facebook.  And God, that was TERRIFYING.  I had to stop.  It was too much, too soon.  I think I put up all of 2 poems before the panic set in.  Too many people could identify me with those words.  So I tried something even smaller.

I started publishing my poems on my tumbr, where very few people knew me for me.  And that's when the change started happening.  People started liking and reblogging my poems.  I have written about this, which I consider to be somewhat of a phenomena, before.  People genuinely seemed to like what I was writing, for the words themselves, not because I was Erica and they knew me and "had" to like it.  Some of my poems have been exceptionally well-received.  I was so proud of myself, which is not a feeling I am overly familiar with.  Proud of the things that I had been keeping from people who love and support me, and always have, for so long.

I shared a couple of poems with people I know in real life, and I'm finally ready to break through and share not only a poem, but the scanned image of it in its original form in my poetry notebook, which is very personal and close to my heart.  That's as raw as it gets.  But I have to post it in its own blog entry... because as my favorite creative writing teacher told me, no disclaimers to your writing.  I'm cheating by having this blog post as an ENORMOUS disclaimer here.  The poem I've chosen to share is not only one of my favorites, but just had a pretty nice reception on tumblr.  So... the poem will be up here in a couple of days... stay tuned!