Fronds of a Fern

  Sometimes I look back on my writing and I re-read it and I can't believe it's me that wrote it.  Half the lines I don't remember, the other half I am blown away that what is written on the page came out of my own head.  I constantly suprise myself.  It's like I'm reading it for the first time, becasue while I know how the story goes, I have lost the specifics, and the beautifully crafted sentences. Usually after I just finish writing something I immediatly save it and then post it. I never go back and re-read it.  It's not a very smart thing to do at all, and I'm sure there are tons of spelling errors (those who know me love that fact because I am usually such a grammar nazi).  It's also a good idea to go back through my writing to make sure it makes sense (usually doesn't, but maybe thats how it's supposed to go...?). The main reason I don't re-read is because I know I would constantly second guess myself, and attempt to fix it and probably re-write half of it, or just trash it completely.  If I went back and re-read everything I have ever written since the beginning of my writing binge, I probably wouldn't have any of it posted anywhere.  I would have re-wrote or destroyed all the beauty that I have written, and that just feels like a crime.  It's the same with my drawing  (I used to draw, but realized I was average at best...) I would spend hours on a drawing, constantly correcting it and feverishly erasing lines, and drawing new ones.  After it was all done and I thought it was good enough I put it down, put it away, wouldn't look at it for at least a few days.  If I went back to it before then I would either crumple it up and throw it away or start erasing lines all over again.  I'm a perfectionist, but only in certain aspects. It's quite frustrating, especially when you aren't very good at something and strive to be better, but no matter how many lines I erased, or how many times I started over I just wasn't satisfied. It wasn't fulfilling to me. That is probably the best way to describe why I stopped drawing ( I may still sketch occasionally, but that's much easier to toss in the trash can and not feel bad about it). 
  So I put down the sketch pad and switched to the laptop.  I may not be great at writing either, but at least it's fulfilling, and not to sound over confident but I think I am much better at writing than I ever was at drawing.  I had loved drawing and art since a very young age, in fact I had actually thought of myself as going into automotive drafting and design in junior high, I loved cars and I loved drawing, perfect right? Well I took my first drafting class and it was o.k but it was so technical, not a whole lot of room for creativity, and I also found out that becoming a car designer is one of the hardest fields to break into... not for me.  So I kept on drawing because I loved doing it. I was never "great" at it, better than most at my school, I guess.  I figured I drew in every class anyway, why not take classes designed for drawing, and they can help me build skills too.  I really enjoyed them, but after high school I had kind of fallen out of it. I kind of fell out of a lot of things since high school (like running... but that's a different story altogether...).
  I didn't retain my skills, I grew rusty, unpracticed, sloppy. I had forgotten most of what I had learned and soon drawing just became this frustrating thing, at one point it was my favorite thing to do and I was decent at it.  Now it's just painful to attempt to go back and draw how I used to, it's like trying to remember a dream, a full day after you had it.  I was feeling very creative and I needed an outlet, some way of expressing how I felt, get all of the shit out of my head, all the thoughts and negativity.  The only way I used to do that was drawing, but that had just become a chore, and in fact added to my negativity.  So I gave that up, but I needed something to fill the void, I still had all that creativity and expression inside of me, with no way of letting it out.  I was a bottle of pop that someone had put into a paint shaker and left it running... sooner or later I was gonna burst.  Then it happened.
  I got my new phone and one of the first things I did was download some free books on it.  I wanted to see the differences in e-readers (I had previously owned a droid and had stepped up to the ilustrious iPhone).  One book in particular touched me.  It reached down inside of me and shut that paint shaker off.  It calmed me, I couldn't put it down, I locked myself in my room that night and I read, I read all night, I finished the book in one sitting and was left aching for more.  To my dismay it was the only free book by the author, and there were many, many more books. In fact the one I fell in love with was the first on a series! I craved more, but I was not about to spend the money to download a book I could get for free at the library right?
  Wrong, this author only writes e-books.  You can not find any of their work in a library or bookstore, the only way to get their books is to download them... I was screwed.  That was about a month and a half ago, and I have yet to read any more by that author but I still intend to, I became side tracked by my own writing.  That book had struck a chord in me that reverberated from deep down within and grew in castraphany so loud that it shook my very core.  I had not even thought of this in a million years, the idea had never even remotely occured to me: If I can't draw anymore, how am I going to express myself?
Umm... write?
  The answer seemed so clear, it practically smacked me in the face.  It's as if the book jumped off the screen of my phone, burrowed into my brain and planted a seed.  My writings are the beautiful flower growing from that seed... Then again maybe it isn't a flower, maybe it's a gigantic fern.  I saw fern because when I was younger my mom took me and my sister to a greenhouse with her so she could pick out flowers for her garden, and for her planters on the porch. She let me and my sister each pick out our own.  We could each have our own part of the landscape of our yard.  Well the plant that I had picked was a fern.  It was relatively small but I liked how it looked, and it reminded me of Jurrasic Park and dinosaurs (an important part of a young boys life).  I forget what my sister picked out but I do remember it didn't flourish nearly as well as my fern.  My fern, my plant, became massive! we had to plant it under the deck because my mom knew it was going to get big, but didn't realize it would take over like it did.  She decided to cut it in half and plant half somewhere else.  As a kid this idea blew me away.  She took half of my gigantic green giant and moved it somewhere else, I now had two amazing plants in two different parts of the yard.  Being able to take a part of something big, and moving it somewhere else and having both halves grow bigger and bigger.  That is what I believe my writing is like (at least that's what I like to belive it's like...) I want somebody to take a part of my writing, I want it to reach them the way that book reached me.  I want it to give them ideas and inspiration. I want them to do something with that, and I want them to make something big out of it.  I want them to create a gigantic green fern with what my writing has given them...