I was nominated by Roberta Laurie to do the Free Style Writing Challenge. I’m not normally the type to post a blog this personal on a site that I generally keep sanitized for the sake of professionalism, but I’ve decided I’d rather be an active writer with content that risks being a bit too open than letting my writing be paralyzed by fear.
The concept of free style writing revolves around the central idea of putting down words that may or may not relate to a particular topic and within a certain time period regardless of spelling or perhaps also grammar.
Here are the rules:
1) Open an MS Word document (it doesn’t have to be MS Word. Really any word processor will do).
2) Set a stop watch or your mobile to 5 minutes or 10 minutes whichever challenge you think you can beat.
3) You topic is at the foot of this post. But do not scroll down to see it until you are ready with the timer
4) Fill the word doc with as much words as you want. Once you began writing do not stop even to turn. Do not cheat by going back and correcting spellings and grammar with spell check in MS WORD.
5) You may or may not pay attention to punctuation and capitals. However if you do, it would be best.
6) At the end of your post write down ‘No. Of words =_____’ so that we would have an idea of how much you can write within the time frame.
7) Do not forget to copy paste the entire passage on your blog post with a new Topic for your nominees and copy paste these rules with your nominations (at least 5 bloggers).
Like my nominator, I found the rules far too restrictive to follow to the letter. Not only did I go over the time limit (though not egregiously), but also I was editing as I went, which is a really, really hard habit to break. Nevertheless, being forced to suddenly write within a very short period of time does wonders for productivity; though I admit to some quick proofreading before publishing, the amount of content, and general flow, are intact enough that I feel it is, while not technically following the rules, legitimate in it’s honesty and adherence to the general spirit of the challenge.
If you could relive one moment of your life
If I could relive one moment of my life, it would be the moment I realized I was gay. As a total closet case, I’d been in complete and utter denial about my sexuality. I’d been deliberately taught by family, unwittingly taught by friends, and generally taught by society at large that gay was a bad thing, “that’s so gay” having been a common description of everything abnormal or evil in the world. So convinced was I of the inherent sickness of the gay plague that I refused to consider the possibility that I was gay. As a result, I became a virulent homophobe. In my gaming group, a place where nerds and geeks and others who have been bullied and ostracized should be welcomed, I was a seething, hateful prick towards the one gaymer I’d ever met up until that point. I’d even played a gay character in a campaign, but so powerful was my cognitive dissonance at the time that I dismissed it as just an act of creative fantasy role playing, utterly ignorant of the reality those words represented.
I wasn’t just a jerk to people who reminded me of my own repugnant sexuality, though. That kind of repression causes all sorts of other emotional turmoil. It’s true that I love my friends who have been by my side both as a “straight” person and after I came out, but it would be a lie to say that I spent as much time partying with them as I did solely for the pleasure of their company. I was drowning the turmoil inside, numbing my brain with liquor and drugs so that I didn’t have to face the fact that I was one of those that society so passionately looked down on.
But in coming out — and not just realizing but ultimately accepting — that was an instant I won’t forget. Within a week I was out to all my closest friends, and, with a few notable exceptions made for the grandrelics from yesteryear, to my entire family within a month. It wasn’t just a “eureka” of realization, but the sudden lifting of a lifetime of emotional repression from too-tired shoulders. I’d spent my entire life clenching my fist so tightly that not just my hand but my entire body had been trembling at the effort. Imagine the joy, the relief, I felt at having been able to finally relax and let my guard down. To be honest, I think I actually broke. In the length of time it takes to have a thought, I went from a tortured wreck sobbing for no reason into my kitchen sink to a smiling, laughing gay man (in both the traditional and the modern sense of the word). That transition was by and far the most meaningful moment of my life, and I’ve never felt as total a sense of clarity on any subject as I did then, excepting perhaps when I finally met my partner Richard almost a decade later.
No. of Words – 501
Now for the truly embarrassing part; I don’t actually follow enough blogs to be able to nominate many people. In fact, the talented Aaron Wannamaker from Muslisms and the incredible Roberta Laurie are about the only people I know who blog even remotely regularly (with the notable exception of Goo Reviews, though I’m not sure this is the kind of challenge is suited to a pop-culture review site), and they’ve both already partaken. So I’m going to nominate people who may or may not blog, and encourage them to take the challenge by either starting a new blog or posting their work to Facebook. I’ll start of course with the incomparable Timothy Anderson, so he can get back at me for ignoring his art nomination earlier this year (I’m really a terrible, terrible visual artist), the enigmatic Lane Bertholet who deserves much more recognition than he receives, the sophisticated Emily Staniland who may be a superior editor but is nonetheless a truly talented writer as well, my sister Melodie McCarthy because of our shared interest in the literary, and James Ball, who’s writing talents sneak into some insightful Facebook posts far too infrequently.
For those of you willing to take up the challenge, your topic is: the most important item still on your bucket list. And… GO!
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