Why Can’t I?

Recently I’ve been interested in improving my writing skills. You see, expressing myself with words has always been something I’ve struggled with. The way my mind works is that I see images in my head and I try to translate those images into words.

Do any of you have this weird situation too?

My vocabulary used to be so limited that I avoided playing Scrabble because I was embarrassed to just be able to make simple 4-letter words. Don’t they always tell you that it’s never too late to learn? Good, because here I am at my age starting to take writing classes and hoping to feel more comfortable with just writing in the way I would speak to you as if you were sitting here right in front of me.

So, last week in my writing course the first assignment was to write for 5 minutes straight without stopping and the subject was “The Invitation.” It was an invitation to write about anything I wanted, and it was just a warm-up exercise.

My first paragraph was “What does an invitation even mean? Want to join? Want to come? Want to say yes? Want to say no? Why can’t I just say no to an invitation if I want to?”  Moving forward to exercise #5, we had to go back to this first exercise and circle the word or words that you liked, write them down and continue writing.

Well, I thought that was a cool and super-fun assignment, and when I looked through the words I circled I chose to expand on “Why can’t I?” So I began writing down a list: Why can’t I_____? Why can’t I _____?

I continued writing those three words and then filled in the blank over and over and over! The teacher told us not to think too much about what we were writing. “Just keep that hand moving,” she said. And I did. Trust me, you don’t want to read all of my answers to this sentence but when I looked back and thought about them some of the ones that jumped out at me were:

Why can’t I reach for the stars?

Why can’t I have a fried shrimp po’ boy with a Heineken for lunch every Friday?

Why can’t I start an online art school?

Why can’t I spend weeks just sitting by the ocean, listening to the sound of the waves, reading?

Why can’t I _____________?

There were so many interesting answers to this question. The final sentence I wrote down on that sheet of lined notebook paper was…

“I CAN do all of these things.”

So what was blocking me from doing them?

It was ME!

My question to you is this…

How can you create any of the things you really want in your life? We are typically the ones in our own way. And just for grins…it won’t take long I promise… write your list of “Why can’t I?” and see what comes up for you?

Love,

Adele

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