Honesty and Growth

At risk of coming across as Sanctimonious--and wouldn't that make a great handle for a chat room!--I shall now speak upon Honesty and Growth in a character. (I clear my throat, and improve my posture before I speak...)

Do you know, as hard as it is to maintain kindness and compassion for others under duress in real life, it is hardest for me to maintain a sense of kindness and compassion for myself when faced with my own imperfection? Yes, I have come to realize I did not materialize, fully formed and perfect from a sea of Happy Foamy Feelings, and it has all but crushed me to admit it...to myself. I am embarrassed, because everyone around me knew it and loved me anyway, but I seem to be the last one to "know" it, and the fact that my efforts to hide my imperfections from others were wasted just drives me nuts. I am, alas, imperfect and transparent, and I meant to be perfect and impervious to other's examinations.

Thankfully, I have found that I am anything but alone in my imperfection and frustration.

Thus, the next hardest thing for me to experience is picking up some form of entertainment by which to escape or to lift my spirits a bit, and wouldn't you know, the heroine in the piece is frickin' perfect? No, not just skinny, I mean she's small bodied (and I am not), she's never tired (and I am), her choices, both the ones she faces and the ones she makes, do not seem to upset her (oh, ho, and mine sometimes--okay, bullshit--often they do), and, she never seems to experience anything more volatile than annoyance or a pissy sort of vengeance when she encounters a barrier or experiences a disappointment (and I burst into flames and thirst for the ability to vaporize people).

A great escape? Hardly. It's more a magnifying glass turned inward at every fault I find in myself.

And, if possible, it becomes even worse when I put on my Man-Colored-Glasses.

To explain, I consider it an honor and a privilege that certain men in my life have permitted me access to their hearts and minds with exquisite honesty, and from these men I have learned much about present day Honor, Duty, Strength, and, yes, Pain. It is with the viewpoint gained by their concourse that I try to look, and to write with my Man-Colored-Glasses.

When I look at that same entertainment, be it literature or film, even popular music, with my Man-Colored-Glasses, I find "myself" faced with a hero with a big dick, who has a bottomless source of money and a perfectly formed, tall tanned body he doesn't have to sweat for, who can make love in Mandarin, Urdu, English, Swedish, Finnish, French and seven dialects of Spanish, perfectly, all the time, every time, never blowing his load at the wrong time (wrong? Hell, it felt right to me!),  who is never tired, never insecure, never bitched at continually by the woman he is with (or women, because, hey, he can have lots of them), and, IF his dreams crash and burn despite his best efforts, he can just move on, sparing one last sort of poignant look at his lost life, before proceeding with that infuriatingly hateful grudge that women find so irresistibly sexy. He's an asshole, and they love it. They eat that shit up like candy. Woo-hoo! What a great release from life.

And "I" will never be like that.

So, I beg the question, do we really want to be? If we just step aside from the Hollywood crap we are spoon fed, and the Western Civ Strong and Independent Contest to which we are carefully indoctrinated; do we really want to be like that?

Hell-to-the-No, is my straight answer.

My big brown ass is delicious, even as much as some travel-size white woman, or a tasty mouthful of Latina, or a lovely golden child of Asia; hot temper, crying spells, mood swings, conflicting feelings and all. And that man over there? The one who isn't six feet tall but he has a great smile and a rather ordinary dick, who works sixty hours a week (or more) and blows his load before five minutes is up because he loves her? He's awesome! Even though he often feels like he isn't enough, that he isn't seen, that he isn't valued as the man he is? Even so, He Rocks.

We're real, people, and we are the heroes and heroines of life. And if we cannot be honest with ourselves, and with our entertainments, our dreams, we cannot grow.

Growth isn't pretty or comfortable. My family once kept a tarantula for almost two years as a pet, and when she grew, her shell ruptured. Say it with me, "Her Shell Ruptured", and she climbed out on weak, wobbly legs and just laid there for days, drying off, hardening up, Completely Vulnerable to death: even the tiny crickets we fed her could have killed her in those days of recovery. She taught me a lot about growth, and when I am having a "spiritual awakening", or a crisis, or a lesson in life (same thing), and I am seething with embarrassment or shame over my weakness, I think of the tarantula: Ruptured. Weak. Then Bigger and Stronger. In that order.

I am going to work on being as kind and forgiving to myself as I am of others; and I am going to keep keeping it real, writing work that puts real people in escapist scenarios, that celebrates what is human and great about them, and what is great about YOU.

Because that would be a treat. That would be some really pleasant entertainment.

--Megan Creel
author, The Companion also available as an ebook at Smashwords and other online retailers.

www.MeganCreel.com