I always wanted to be a patient person but it is a virtue I simply do not have. I thought I’d gain it through my career working with inpatient mentally ill people and while I was empathetic, caring and tolerant, I was not patient. Then I thought I might obtain some when I moved in with my mother to take care of her. She had vascular dementia (which I briefly talked about last week) and I took her to dialysis 3x a week. It was rough because I was still working with the elderly who suffered from dementia. So, I’d work all day with dementia patients and go home to my mom with dementia. Again, I was empathetic, caring, tolerant, loving and would do it all again, but oh, how many breaths, counting to 10s I needed to do. And even now, since April of last year, dealing with this osteomyelitis and the pain it has brought, the treatment I have been fighting for and the ears I have begged to listen to me, you would think I get at least a smidge of patience, but no. Now that I have a PICC line and am tethered to IV antibiotics 2 times a day at 2 hours each, you’d think this ‘down time’ would teach me a thing or two about patience, right?
Yet, when it comes to writing, I know when I need to walk away from a project for a while. I know when to let a character take me on their journey. I know when I want to finish the project and when the project gets finished is ALWAYS two different dates (and you’d think by now I’d be used to that). But what’s funny, and there is a funny part, I’m really in no rush to write. I do my research, I work on my characters, I watch them come to life, I give them time to see what they want and where they want to go, I play around with my plot, do constant editing and rewrites and I am…ready for this?, PATIENT with it.
So if you are like me and think there is no way you can write a book because you “don’t have the patience” for it, you may just surprise yourself, I did AND I am here to help you too. So get those thoughts down on paper. You’ll be surprised what you can do once you put your mind and talents together.
Until next time…
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