What profound exclamations can I bestow upon the world to inspire that masses I ponder. Well nothing really, not at 11:00pm at night when I've had stuff all sleep for the past, oh I don't know - lifetime.
Actually inspiration is around me everywhere, everyday, you just have to learn to open your eyes. It's in the coffee that the young girl at our cafe makes me (hi Kasey), its in the way my little pup pup Sooky sneezes, it's in the way that the smile on my daughter Navardas face just lights up a room, its in the frost that breaks under my step.
Inspiration is everywhere and anywhere, you just have to open your eyes (and your heart) to see it. In actual fact, when you are inspired, when you speak with passion, when you come from love and not hate or anger, YOU inspire the world - YOU inspire ME.
OK so Alice in Wonderland is huge at the moment and all over the world you hear about how this or that person can sooo relate to Alice and her journey through Wonderland and how the characters in the story resemble someone in their life. Well not me. When I think of what fictional story my life relates to, all I can think of is Drop Dead Fred (Written by C. Marshall).
It’s a story about a young woman who, when she was little, invented this imaginary friend called Fred. Together they would get up to all sorts of mischief but her mother locked him away in a tin. Now as a grown-up, her life is falling apart because of her controlling mother and a womanising husband. To cope with it all she “lets Fred out” and he ends up causing her a whole heap of strife, separate to what’s already wrong in her life. For me it was a story of self-realisation and of confronting your demons and becoming who you were meant to be, not who you thought everyone wanted you to be.
Right so how do I relate to that? Well, I feel as though I have a “Fred” in my life. That someone who I created when I was little to help me to cope with the wrongs in my life at the time, who now, as a grown up, still wants to muck my life up by telling me things about myself that are no longer of a service to me.
You know when we are children and we are faced with negative criticism from those that we love the most, we protect ourselves by telling ourselves that the reason they are doing such and such or saying so and so, is because there is something wrong with us. We make excuses for the offender and the bulk of the time that excuse is that we, us little people, are not good enough, brave enough, tough enough, loveable enough therefore we are to blame! What big thoughts, what grown-up thoughts for such a small wee vulnerable thing that we are at that moment. Then to add insult to injury, we carry that little voice, that little recording, THAT FRED, with us for the rest of our lives.
If we are one of the lucky ones we travel the path that says “piss off I’m a great person and that experience, that happening, had nothing to do with me” but if we are not lucky (like myself), we spend the rest of our lives beating the shit out of ourselves until one day, we end it, one way or another.
And what does my Fred tell me. He is a master at telling me how shit I am at everything I say and do – mother, wife, friend, artist, lover, employee – you name it, he tells me how much I suck at it. Then why the hell do I continue to listen? I ask myself that same question every single day of my life – for Gods sake, when am I going to stop listening?!!!
I feel like a fraud. I walk around saying how much I want to change, how much I want to improve my life, I employ the services whose business it is to help you with that process and yet here I am again listening, believing and following Fred. I am so resentful with myself, with ‘my lot in life’, that I have just stopped. Stopped functioning, stopped being a part – not of life but of myself. Oh poor me, oh whoa-is me, oh ….. SHUT UP FRED!
