Never afraid? Not so. Nonetheless, no harm in trying…

I have written many things that never see the light of day beyond the moment they’re written.
Some because they’re just a stopgap, a way for the words that are clogging up the flow to get the hell out of the way so the torrent can tumble freely.
Some because they’re half light, a flicker of something not quite strong enough to power an entire community of thought, but sparkly enough to keep around for those moments when one only needs a fitful amount of battery power.
Some are great and every ounce of me screams “OH MY GOD SUBMIT THIS!” And I smile and go online and cruise the various places that might like to share something such as this with the small worlds that orbit their sites. There is typically a link somewhere on the page.. write for us! submit! click here to share! your words can save lives! Or whatever…and so I click
Then there are instructions. Please submit your thing in (insert format here) and make sure that you haven’t already given it to a whole bunch of other people and be aware that we get a lot of stuff and it might take a while and don’t take it personally if you never hear from us because it doesn’t mean you suck it just means we didn’t like it and remember we get a lot of stuff and oh yeah! Please submit an artists’ bio of less than 150 words with a picture so we can attribute it to the right person and please don’t just send the word garble copied 148 times with a picture of the mahna mahna guy.

And then I close the page. And go make some tea to sip in the bath while reading comics. Because I didn’t really want to submit anyway. It was just a silly dream I had for a moment.

Here’s the hilarious part of my entire existence.
Everything I write, on some level, is about me. Even when it’s not. Here in this space, I write about myself incessantly. It’s literally the only thing I know well, and I’m still discovering parts that surprise me. Which is awesome.

But the second someone says, tell me about yourself…

Oh. ok…um….

In less than 150 words that are cohesive and moderately honest.

Garble? garble garble? Mahna….

WHY IS THIS SO HARD?

I rebel so much at the notion that I can be summed up, that I can be pigeonholed or compartmentalized or say anything about myself that doesn’t come across as narcissistic and blow my own hornucopiously shallow.
I don’t know why I’m afraid (because I’ve come to understand when I type or say the word rebel (as the verb, not the noun) it’s pretty much me saying “I’m scared of that.”  Example. The canadian government at this moment in time makes me want to rebel against them. Translation? Stephen Harper scares the fuck out of me.

But anyway. One of the writing prompts that recently came up in the super awesome super supportive writing group of peoples I’m lucky enough to be a part of was….yup! ARTIST BIO!! Less than 150 words. When I first read that I was like, fuck you Jay Long for picking the one thing that I really don’t want to do. I think it was posted like 3 weeks ago. I grumbled, there was some muttering. There was a moment when I actually said out loud, well, I don’t have to do all of them!
And then people started posting and they were so good and I was thinking how do they know themselves so well! And then I thought, why are you over complicating this like a crazy person?So I wrote a thing. I don’t think this will be the thing that helps me get published, but at least I can now fill out the form in it’s damn entirety. I just hope they’re good with a picture of the mahna mahna guy…