Ode to Self-Help Books

I’m burnt right now. I really can’t seem to put words together today. Maybe it’s this blogging thing. And when I’m not blogging I’m writing emails to people who I want to love me-- love my work--buy my work. Yes, buy my work.

I have been in love with the idea of being a writer since I was a very young girl. All it took was my third grade teacher putting my four, or maybe it was three, line poem, “Why I love Christmas” in the P.S 71-Rose E Scala year book to sucker me into a life of wanting an audience. Yes, I wanted fame. I dreamed of fame, yearned for it. Stayed up nights tossing and turning for it, but fortune was never on my radar. Hence, a checking account that is in overdraft most months.

Thirty-Seven years later and I still want the fame. Yes, I want people to hear my name and say, “Patricia Dunn! Your work, your words, changed my life. I can’t look into a mirror without thinking of you. [Reference to my YA novel] Your words got me off antidepressants. Your words helped me to open my heart. I have found the love of my life because of you. Your words made all of my dreams come true.” Delusional? Oh, I don’t think so.

Why can’t I have what I want? If I’m going to want, I’m going to want BIG and NOW!

Only now I don’t just want the fame. I want the fortune too.

This is where the self-help books tell me to envision what I want—
I see myself in a beautiful and big house on the beach where all of my friends, and on occasional holidays my family, come and visit me, and the sound of the waves breaking against the rocks bring us peace, and, love, and fill us with joy. “Happy and peppy and bursting with love, ” I sing the words of Felix Unger. Yes, I can feel it. I can feel the peppy popping out of my pores, and I can see the unlimited amount of cash filling my pockets. I can see myself sending FedEx envelopes filled with cash to strangers whose names I picked out of a phone book. Yes, I can be a patron of the arts, a patron saint, my own patron. And all this will be possible because of those words. Those words that my third grade teacher loved enough to publish—“Why I love Christmas”… I don’t remember the rest of that poem, but if I were to write it now, it would go something like this—

“Why I love Christmas?
I love Christmas because it’s a day
when I can give it all away,
and know that the next day there still will be plenty in reserve.”