Day 30: A Letter to Myself

Well Hi There Good Looking!

Wow, the temptation to hide this whole letter behind a thick curtain of irony is frighteningly strong right now. However, I’m going to try really hard not to do that, because to be perfectly honest, I’m so sick of hiding. I’m tired of finding the corner in a crowded room, I’m tired of trying to make myself small and un-noticeable (yes that is ironic, since there is nothing small about me!) and I’m just plain tired of hiding who I am behind who I think I should be.

A good friend of mine recently picked me up on the whole hiding thing. She said that my willingness to share my deepest and most personal life stories with every man and his neighbour is just another way of hiding. I shield myself with these stories like a careful camouflage, using them as a distraction. Much like the tail of a peacock. It dazzles the eye, distracting you from noticing that the bird is actually a dude, and that he’s dressed like the love-child of Elton John and Dame Edna (ironic). If you do happen to notice these things? Well, hopefully you’re still too captivated by the intricacies of that tail to care. Apparently I do that with my dazzling stories of depression, and being overweight. Who knew!?

So, what does all of this mean? Will I start wearing magenta spandex wherever I go now? Will I now announce my arrival into a room with a hearty rendition of ‘Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me’? No, I don’t think that’s the point of all this revelation. It’s not about me being noticed or unnoticed, it’s about coming to a place where I finally see the person I am and just accept her.

These letters have been a revelation. They have been a chrysalis, a journey and a birthing. They have revealed so much of what is within me, and they have opened my eyes anew to the extraordinary and miraculous people around me. I have been hugged, thanked, encouraged and embraced by people in a way I could never have imagined. I have reflected, and explored and articulated my life and self and I have been changed because of it. These things just don’t happen in a corner, they don’t happen when you are burying yourself in the sand, they don’t happen when you are trying so hard to be what you think is acceptable to everyone else. They’ve happened here, in this piece of cyberspace where I am front and centre. Where I have poured out my self and discovered a person I kinda like! she is caring, and insightful. She is witty and naughty. She is flawed and in some places a bit broken. But she is emerging, and she is brave, and I have a sneaking suspicion that she is also going to be a bit fierce!

I don’t know what the future holds, but I know it is big, I know it is good and I know I will play the main character! There are no limits, there are only possibilities and opportunities waiting for me to seize them. My life is immense and it’s about time I started to explore it!

And this will be my theme song!!

Now, chin up, shoulders back, and move away from the corner…

Love you xo

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Day 23: A Letter To Someone Who Has Changed My Life

Dear Dr Paul,

I guess it’s about time I told you all of these things, it’s certainly been a long time coming. You see when I began this blog, my first post was dedicated to one of the two people who had a huge influence upon me taking steps toward becoming a ‘writer’. In that post I hinted that I would eventually tell the story of the first person that nudged me onto this path of words. The person who quite literally changed my life.

That person was you.

It’s better than fiction really. A depressed, overweight housewife goes to visit the local GP at a sleepy country medical practice. She wants to lose weight, expecting to be glanced over and handed a prescription for diet pills (again) she has no idea that her life is about to change.

I don’t know what you saw that day, or if you even remember me, but I will always remember you. I remember leaving your office with an assignment instead of a prescription, you asked me to write the story of my life and bring it back to you in a week.
So I wrote, and wrote, and wrote! I remember my husband asking me one night as I scratched away in my notebook, if I was going to have to pay you extra for how long it would take you to read it! Eventually, satisfied that I had captured how I saw my life I gave you the missive and waited for your evaluation. I also suspected that as well as diet pills you may also add a couple of extra prescriptions!

I will never forget your face as you sat before me the following week. You held my chronicle in your hands and looked me in the eye.

“I want you to make me a promise. I want you to faithfully promise me something”.

My heart was in my throat by this stage, I think I murmured a strained “okay”.

“I want you to promise me that you will go to university”.

I’m fairly certain I stopped processing most everything else after that, university was the last thing I expected you to say! Yet, with that one word a light switched on inside my soul. To this day that light hasn’t dimmed, it continues to burn brighter with every step I take on this path of words and tales.

I know I left your office that day filled to overflowing with encouragement. Filled with vision as I hadn’t been before, you looked beyond the frumpy and lost person who wandered into your office, and deposited hope and possibility. I could write for decades and never come close to explaining the profound and pivotal role you have played in my life, I will be glad if this letter provides you with even the slightest glimpse of the changes your influence has wrought.

It may seem strange to others reading this, that from that point my contact with you was very little. I think the last time I saw you was to show you my acceptance letter into university. So let me take this opportunity to give you a quick ‘highlights reel’ of the last 4 years…

• 2008-2009 Achieved a HD average across all subjects.
• 2009 Gave birth to Samuel Shaun.
• 2010 Began this blog and continued with study maintaining my HD average.
• 2011 Was accepted into Oxford University’s Creative Writing Summer Program and spent 5 weeks studying and exploring England and Scotland.

• 

  The birth of Samuel Shaun Hunter, October 2009.

  

  Me at Exeter College, Oxford.

  

  
  

Obviously I could expand each of those points a million times over, but I really just wanted to give you a glimpse of how my life has changed. Because of you.

Because as a doctor, you chose to see me as a story instead of a case study. You unlocked something that allowed me to make choices I didn’t even know were available to me. You opened my eyes to a new future, if I was brave enough to jump into it. I am so glad I was!

I don’t know how many other people you’ve influenced or empowered as you have me, and though I’m only one I hope that you understand how thankful I am for you. My life has forever been made infinitely more wonderful, adventurous, imaginative and colourful because you dared to be more than every other doctor I have known.

I now understand that we can never know just how much our words, our encouragement, our belief can transform a persons life.

Thank you from the depths of my heart.

Amelia xo

P.S. I’m still chunky 😉

Day 11: A Letter to My Dreams

Dear Dreams,

Actually, you know what? Just forget the whole ‘Dear Dreams’ thing. As far as I’m concerned, that’s like starting a letter with ‘Dear People’, it’s dumb! I mean, to which dreams am I referring? My sleep dreams? My daydreams? Dreams, as in my aspirations, or do I mean the dreams I had as a child? The ones swept away on the tides of time – I never did become the Cabbage Patch Kid Spokesperson.

Let’s start with my sleeping dreams, I dream vividly. Every night. I don’t always remember them, but usually I’ll hold onto at least a few frames of memory, enough so I know that my mind was wild and active while I slept. I love to dream, I’ve dreamt of the most wonderful things and places.

I’ve walked through a mansion created out of a living rainforest. Ceilings that vaulted into the sky, where the light was soft and green and the air smelled of a waterfall. The massive trunks would merge and divide to form rooms, doorways and windows. Nothing was cut or manufactured, it was all a part of a peaceful majestic whole.
I have flown through the halls of my primary school, felt the exhilaration as I burst out of the doors and into the sky; free, high above everything I ever experienced there.
I have been presented before medieval royalty, wearing an amazing gown of deep silver. I bowed before a throne and solved a mystery hidden within a tapestry.
I have woken myself up with my laughter, and I have woken my husband up with my swearing (sorry!).
I love to sleep, because when I dream, there my imagination is free and unconstrained. I learn about myself, I am told stories, I am brave and adventurous.

Do you dream?

Then there are aspirational dreams, these are trickier. I think their trickier-ness is tied up in the whole childhood part of our dreaming. How many times in your life were you told that for one reason or another, the dreams you had conceived for your life were at best, unlikely, at worst, downright stupid? Yeah, me too – we’ve all had ‘well meaning’ adults kill a dream in it’s infancy with a good dose of reality. Well I think it’s about time we kick reality up the bum (yes, Mummy said bum – she’s sorry).

I lost all my dreams for a really long time. It was awful. Life was so grey, so boring! Then as I began to seize some crazy ideas, some not so crazy and very do-able opportunities opened up! I announced one day that I wanted to be a writer – people looked at me with polite surprise, eyebrows raised and awkward murmurs. But while the dream seemed crazy at the time – the steps I took eventually led me to university. Since then I’ve grown into that dream a little bit at a time. Reality would have scoffed at the notion of me studying at Oxford University, but I did that too!

I have other dreams: I want to live in America – San Francisco has a special place in my heart. I want to walk through Scotland and Ireland and watch my husbands face as he inspects the ancient stone walls. I want to inspire people on a global scale – I want to share hope and life. I’m sick of watching people shrink and decay in lives without vision. I want to write books, lots of books – stories that shatter the walls people have built to contain their imaginations.

Dreams are amazing things, but unless they are coupled with belief and action. They are nothing more than wisps of smoke in the space between waking and sleeping. A dream is a seed, within it is the potential for that final destination. Unless you plant it, and surrender to the processes that must happen for it to grow it will always remain simply words on your wall, a line in your journal or a secret in your heart.

I guess this wasn’t really a letter to my dreams after all, it was really a letter to dreamers.

So My Dear Dreamers,

Dream Big, Be Brave, Be Strong, Be Extraordinary!

xxoo

 

Sorry

I know, it’s been forever since I posted anything. To be perfectly honest it’s been forever since I’ve written anything!

The only way I can explain it is; that for a while there, all the joy and love got sucked out of even the idea of writing! There were a whole lot of factors involved, but I will make you a list of my feelings so you get an idea of where my head was at when it came to writing anything these last few months.

Overwhelmed, Doubting, Lost, Guilty, Undermined, Frustrated, Disappointed, Useless,

Bound, Failure, Past, Tired, SPENT!

Does that help? Don’t fret though, I neatly compartmentalised these darker feelings and they only remained attached to my writing. As to the rest of my life; it’s been going along nicely, just minus a few thousand words.

So who am I apologising to? Those of you who have ever landed here by accident, glanced at a post here and there. To you who have encouraged me with your comments, and have felt a connection to what I write. To my friends who ask me why I haven’t written anything lately. To my family who have been patient and protective of me. To myself.

When it comes to putting words on a page, it is an extension of my heart. I write what I feel, what I see, what I hope and dream. This writing isn’t malleable, it’s not domesticated or house trained! One day the words will paint a beautiful forest cathedral of the most violent pink blossom, the next they will lift the heart of a treasured friend.

I lost that, I forgot the love and excitement that blooms inside of me when I begin to write. The childlike wonder I feel when my imagination takes me off the path of what is known and unveils what is hidden, and magical and impossible!

I found it again! That vibrancy of capturing what only I can imagine, the courage to defeat my inner foe, the knowledge that who I am is exactly who I am meant to be.

So, I’m sorry I got lost there for a while. But I am back now, and I am bubbling with things to share.