My Published Articles for ViewsHound: I have an Inferiority Complex for Writing for ViewsHound

Friday, December 23, 2011

I have an Inferiority Complex for Writing for ViewsHound

The signs of bad weather approaching as viewed from the balcony of the beach house

How come I still feel inadequate about my writing activities, specifically for ViewsHound? I think I know the answer, but I will not put it in writing until the end of this article.

Let me start by saying that writing has never been my dream or goal in life. But after my retirement in 2002, I found I need some activity that sharpens my old brain besides playing bridge and computer games. So in 2008, I started blogging as suggested by a friend who is a professional blogger.

The topic I chose was about my life experiences here in the US and comparing it with life in the Philippines. It was almost a year ago, when I realized that I have numerous readers, about 100 daily based on Google statistics, and comments on my blogs. A number of my readers gave positive comments about my posts and how they like my writing style. However, there were a couple of comments that were so negative it still hurts my ego even today. Luckily there were only 2 negative comments out of the more than 500 that I have received in my 8 blogs, as of today.

The next year my writing activity soared to great heights when three of my articles were published in Huliq News. Another three articles were published in a widely read Internet magazine about Life in the Philippines. I also started writing my autobiography and created a website for Chateau Du Mer, my beach resort in Boac, Marinduque, Philippines.

As suggested by another friend, I signed for the Google AdSense program and started earning about $10 per month. I joined Facebook and Twitter to advertise the beach resort and conference center. The readership of my 8 blogs went up to about 120 readers daily and I was a very happy blogger.

In August I discovered ViewsHound. Today, I have written 46 articles, 1 gold winner, 6 followers and has now over 10,000 views. My goal is to write 50 articles for ViewsHound by the end of the year.

But I still feel inadequate about my writing activities. I am envious of the writing styles of Jan Bird, Vernon Crumrine, Deb Hamilton and Jessica Willoughby. I am envious of the poems written by my good friend Vic Vizarra. I know there is no reason why I should feel this way. Based on comments from my blogs, I know I am a fairly good writer and a lot of my readers like my style of writing.

I believe the reason why I have still have an inferiority complex about my writing is deep rooted in my memory of my earlier years. It probably started during my elementary school days, when I received the lowest grade of 75% in my English and grammar classes. All my other grades in math, science, history and others were in the 90 to 95% range. Because of my low grade in English, instead of graduating valedictorian of the class, I only received a Second Honor award.

In my high school year, I was surprised when I was chosen editor of our high school newspaper. I wrote several poems, articles about the advantages and disadvantages of being the oldest child, and other topics about high school life that were of interest to my age group. My English grade improved. There was a point in my high school years that I wanted to get a degree in journalism. When I informed my parents of my plan to study journalism in college, they discouraged me. They said there is no money in journalism. I will starve and will never be able to support a family if I depend my livelihood as a writer. They insisted I take either medicine, law or just become a Catholic priest.

In college, I took the Pre-Med course as suggested by my parents. At the end of my second year, I know medicine was not for me, since the sight of blood nauseated me. I shifted to chemistry and the rest is history. During my undergraduate and graduate school years, almost all of my courses were in science and mathematics. There was no need to be a writer until two years ago, when I started blogging.

Today, I am extremely happy writing my blogs and writing articles for ViewsHound. Do I still feel inadequate about my writing activities? As of this moment, the resounding answer is NO! However, my current wish is to get another award from ViewsHound, perhaps a silver, a bronze or the readers' award. If this happens in the future, it will certainly alleviate my feeling of inadequacy as a writer and blogger.

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Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Friday, December 23, 2011

I have an Inferiority Complex for Writing for ViewsHound

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