Never lose sight of what matters

Never lose sight of what matters

Sometimes life can be great at distracting us. Take me for example, something shiny comes along my way and away I go, chasing the shiny thing.

Our story begins when I was a young lad with a HUGE imagination,

Attribution: By Mehdinom (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I would write stories and invent awesome new characters

Mob stories I’d love to write. I was a great fan of crime dramas.

Yet one summers day when I was spending the weekend at my Dads he asked me what I was doing,

Writing, I told him,

And, in one swift move he destroyed what I always wanted to do for a long time.

Write.

Yeah, he took those pages and ripped them up into a frizillion tiny little pieces,

“You’ll never get anywhere”

Dad, if anything was the single most destructive force in my life

Because he wanted me to be like a little clone of himself,

He wanted me to go into the same trade, and do the same things,

And I was just, well, me.

But that was the end of that. And it was tough because I had focus and dreams for writing

I wanted to be published

I wanted to be recognised

I wanted to create amazing fictional stories that would have people gasping for more

And Dad, he crushed that.

I ended up doing not very much for “me” for over a decade,

Truth be told I always felt as if I was living someone else’s life

A neat little construct of what Dad and Mum wanted me to be, and other family too,

They all had plans for me.

They knew I was good at certain things. My Auntie, she wanted me to be an Artist, just not of the writing kind, but of the painting kind,

My Mum wanted me to be a Doctor,

Attribution: By Ernie Branson (Photographer) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

And my Dad wanted me to be an Electrician just like him.

No-one ever stopped and asked what I wanted to be. And it was too confusing,

Trying to please my family and friends, and ended up not doing much at all.

It wasn’t until I stood up and said, fuck it, I’ll do what I want to do that things started to change,

And boy did they

When I finally did what I wanted to do I started to enjoy the work that I was doing,

And I enjoyed it so much that I took it on my own. I was tired of giving 100% only to receive a fraction of that back in wages,

And life sort of fell into place from there,

It was my last job that encouraged me to write again. I was telling them how I used to love it.

Seems like they helped me find myself,

So I’m here, in hope that by writing I help a few people along the way to finding their selves,

And find their awesome

And realise that they are awesome too,

You’re awesome,

Life is awesome.

Own it :)