Hills, Mountains, and a Hopeful Heart

 In life you have mountains and you have hills. Depending on who you are, even hills can seem like mountains. But there's no use whining about the things that pop in your life--you just have to take a deep breath (and hope that you've been working out at a gym recently) and charge up those hills and mountains, because there always going to be there, waiting. Immovable. For some people hills are getting less hours at work, being late for a meeting or date, or even accidentally paying rent late. Mountains are tougher, and often times they're internal. Such as overcoming addiction, self-hate, and depression.

My particular hill is self-doubt. Sometimes it goes away and I see nothing but a straight road to my goals with a nicely paved path and arrows blinking lights shouting, "you're going the right way!" Other times it becomes a hill that turns into a mountain and the signs are broken and read "turn back, you can't do this." Self-doubt is a hard thing to beat. Almost as hard as finding courage to climb past those signs and up the narrow trail winding into the mountains. It's something I struggle with daily. Today it was a tiny hill, tomorrow it could be a mountain. But that's where Hope comes in.

Hope for a better future, hope that my books will do well. Hope that I will somehow, someday, touch someone's life with my words. Make them look up from the last chapter and breath "It can't end!" The more I read, the more I write, the more I'm absolutely positive that writing is what I was meant to do with my life. Stories bubble up out of nowhere. Dreams. Thoughts. Laundry Commercials. Yarn. And I don't feel as much joy, agony, frustration, and triumph than when my hands are flying over my laptop keys putting forth a world that seems to come out all by itself.

I try not to listen to the self-doubt. I try to keep a hopeful heart. Because someday--and someday soon--my words will reach more than a few select friends, teenagers, and children. Someday soon my words will be seen by thousands and delight people of all ages. Or hopefully encouraged some one to want to be a writer too! For the past few weeks self-doubt has been a large mountain, but I heard a quote from a show recently, and it was so beautifully (if painfully) true that I've made it my new mantra. I say it every time I look into my e-mail box and see that I have no response from the latest agent I sent my book to. Because you need Hopeful Heart in this world of writing. Otherwise you might as well get rid of Word from your desktop and stop burning candles to the gods of writing.

"Confidence is easy. Confidence you can fake. But Success? You have to fail many times to get that."