A friend once said to me – they stole the life you were supposed to have! I was surprised by her angered response about something from my past. I’d never considered that anything had been stolen from me, taken from me, or that I missed out on anything in particular having not had the perfect childhood. See, I don’t believe there is a perfect childhood.
I remember a young woman saying, “my life would have been so much better if I’d had a father.” She was bemoaning the fact that she was raised by a single mother. And I said, “What if you had a father that beat you and your mother? What if he drank? What if you had a father that stayed out all night or didn’t work for a living?” She fumed – how can you say that?
People have this image in their heads of how things are supposed to be and they lament what they believe they do not have or what they’ve lost. They believe their lives might have been magically transformed had that …. blah.. blah.. blah… been different or perfect. I consider – it could have been worse!
I’ve just always taken the experience at face value. My parents made mistakes. Everyone’s parents make mistakes. But you get what you get and you make the best of it.
In watching the Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary, he said his tyrant of a father motivated him to do more, to do better; he says, if it wasn’t for his father, he would have never left his small town.
YES! Had it not been for the childhood I experienced, I may not have been so incredibly motivated to escape, to do better, to strive for more.
The truth is – like Schwarzenegger’s brother – some people don’t get out. They stay stuck. That was my worse nightmare.
My experiences of lack have informed my writing, have inspired me to strive for more, have helped me develop empathy and compassion. My shitty childhood motivated me to do more, want more, be more.
When I write about the past, I am not wailing about it. I’m praising the resilience I gained to overcome life’s challenges!
Nietzsche’s whole quote: “Out of life’s school of war: what does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
It’s a much abused and misquoted line. Maybe even I am oversimplifying it.
It’s a choice. You can choose to let the school of hard knocks keep you down, or you can choose to get back up. It’s hard sometimes to keep fighting – and you have to refine your technique. But you can win. And it’s not by looking back and wishing for what might have been, but by looking and moving forward.
Create the life you want.
Chatting with my students, I reminded them I didn’t have google nor a cell phone and, if I needed to look up information, I had to walk to the library and figure out the card catalogue. (Of course, I added the obligatory “walk ten miles in the snow up hill both ways”).
I think I would be, like many people today, too distracted to focus on creating other worlds and investigating the motivations of people/characters.
I guess I’m saying, boredom can be good for you. Daydreaming, thinking, and spending an afternoon lounging without distraction can be helpful to a writer. We need to allow our minds wander sometimes, see where they go; keep your mind from distraction, turn off the tele, the cell, the computer, and be inhibited by the lack – your mind will rebel and it will begin to create.
Noreen Lace 
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