Take Back Your Life!

It’s Wednesday again. Time for Jamie Ridler‘s weekly wish circle. Great way to meet other bloggers and visit new blogs. I highly recommend it! Today’s wish prompt: What do you wish to remember?

I wish to remember that my life belongs to me and I can fashion it any way I like. The conformist push and pull to live, be and act a certain way makes for an unfulfilled life. Giulietta the Muse, inspirational rebel, follows her own path through life!

I’m following some fun Tweeters on Twitter. One is Moontree Letterpress. Lovely designs for letterpress aficionados as well as a weekly Monday contest for those who love to word sculpt. I’m a contest & a word junkie so this fun letterpress blog awards me a double high for participation. There’s also a letterpress prize if you want something concrete for your guessing efforts.

Contests get my mind moving in a direction it might not normally move. They keep me thinking outside the box that’s outside the box. Nothing worse than a rusty brain. I know the Tin Man of Wizard of Oz fame used his rusty body as an excuse for not participating in life, but it seems more likely that rusty brains keep us from doing so.

Patrolling the malls and watching reality shows puts my brain to sleep, which is why I try to avoid both of them. I used to get to the end of a mall or a show and say, “why did I just waste my precious life doing this?”

What do you do to keep your brain from rusting?

Muse thx,

Giulietta the Muse

I’m doing this wishcasting circle right now. Ran across it on Twitter and since I love to do new things, it sounded fun. Check it out to get on the wish list …

http://jamieridlerstudios.ca/wishcasting-wednesday-july-22

I wish that young men all over the planet would turn to each other, their tribal leaders, their governments and say, “I refuse to fight.” Because if all the young men realize that they hold the key to world peace, we might finally have some.

I try to leave at least 1 comment a day on someone else’s blog. Comments fire up the blog writer and they also fire up the blog commenter. I get all sorts of writing ideas from my own comments! In fact, I now regularly collect them for future writing or life shop use. Ideas for writing or life shops surround us. If you’re suffering from any kind of writer’s block it may be that you’ve closed off some part of yourself.

Open it up by going to someone else’s blog and leaving a comment where you can reflect on what this individual has said. I like to think of life as one giant energy ricochet with everyone’s energy pinging off each other.

Be open and you’ll receive all sorts of energizing ideas!

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Hey lovers of life,

Most folks out there want to help you make more money & that’s fine. I want to help you make more life. That’s what Giulietta the Muse is all about — helping you get your life back, before it’s over. It’s short enough, why not maximize it? We’ve been taught to put our REAL lives off until retirement, until we may or may not be able to even walk or may not even be alive.

Have you heard yourself say, “I’ll start travelling when I retire?” The problem with waiting until you retire is that you may be really tired. Isn’t that what retire is short for? really tired? tired of living everyone’s life but your own?

Forget retirement, live now!

Start today by making a list of 50 things you’d like to do. I’d love to hear some of them if you care to leave a daring comment. Chances are good that if you announce them to the world, they’ll happen.

Muse thx,

Giulietta

Why

I’m a big Twitter fan. It’s easy and fun to write 140 character snippets. But my favorite reason for being on Twitter? I get great writing ideas. Today @CrazyColumbian poised the following question, “How can we use anger constructively?” Great question and one I can answer since I used to feel way too angry (powerless) much of the time.

I figured out I got angry for two reasons.

#1 I needed to speak my truth. There was something bottled up inside of me that needed to come out.

#2 I didn’t feel like I could speak my truth, that the financial, social, political, familial ramifications would somehow be greater than the health ramifications of suppressing my truth.

Somewhere along my growing up line, I learned to ignore #1 out of fear of #2. Why generations of parents going back to the Cave Age would teach children not to speak their truths makes no sense to me as an adult. Society ends up with lots of depressed people turning their anger inward or outward, both destructive.

I either had to express my anger or spiral down into a life of very, very quiet desperation.

I chose to take my life back. I started with little baby “speaking my truth steps” like taking assertiveness training classes, returning things, telling off people into their answering machines, eventually progressing into saying things to people on the phone, then in person, then in public. I also became a writer. It’s a great way to get the “it” out, the horrible alien living inside that feeds off human organs.

How about you? Are you ready to stop feeding the insatiable anger alien living inside you?

I never thought about becoming a professional blogger until I stumbled on the professional blogger web site. Always up for a new challenge, writing or otherwise, I immediately said, “yes, i’ll do it!” Now, I need to make sure my site is pro-blogger ready. (It isn’t.) Site has lots of good info.

Blogging is kind of like virtual journaling. I always had a tough time keeping a real journal because my handwriting takes a top CSI team to decipher. I don’t even know what I’ve written most of the time. In elementary school, the teachers put me in a remedial handwriting class where I had to spend my recess practicing writing gigantic vowels over and over. It didn’t help. My handwriting is what it is. We are what we are. It seems that we spend a lot of time and energy trying to become something we aren’t instead of celebrating who we are.

I’m a great writer with messy handwriting. Just another contradiction that makes me who I am.

Contradictions hold the keys to self discovery. That’s where you need to look to find the secret to your own life.

Muse thx,

Giulietta

Hey folks,

just joined Technorati. it’s a good way to get my blog out to the world … they need my code:

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want to join? please visit http://www.technorati.com

If you want to become a better writer, write as much as you can. It’s like any other endeavor: Practice, while it may not make perfect, makes a very good imperfect. And the best writing is imperfect.

Perfect writing never gets published or finished because there’s no such thing. Sometimes sending an essay or article to an editor is the best thing you can do for a piece of writing. Many times, I’ve hit the send button only to simultaneously realize as my essay hurtles through cyber space that the ending made no sense.

The editor usually shares my revelation by sending me a rejection. I toss the rejection into the virtual trash, bask in my newfound humility, rewrite the ending and send it somewhere else.

Sometimes you need to let go of a piece of writing to find it.

Happy writing to all of you!

Muse thx, G.

p.s. I’m teaching an essay writing class in August. Click here for more details!

Secrets of Essay Writing