Philosophy Friday- The Return

GOOD VIEW














GOOD STUFF
Started writing the Sedona novella and am currently into chapter two
The Precious Angel- after a very rough first morning- is loving summer day camp
Mom will finally be released from post-operative rehab in about 2 weeks
I submitted a new Blaze idea yesterday

GOOD ADVICE
"Books saved my life. I am not being melodramatic. I had a miserable childhood. This was not necessarily anyone’s fault; I was simply born into a family and a community that didn’t embrace dreamy introverts like me, and where I never felt I belonged. I spent most of my childhood and adolescence feeling lonely, unseen, and wrong. I had a few friends who shared these feelings. For the most part, they slipped into early alcoholism, drug abuse, and teenage pregnancy. I read.

I don’t mean merely that books entertained me and served as a safe means of escape while I waited for my childhood to be over and my real life to begin—though they did serve that purpose. They did more, though. They introduced me to the reality of a community that transcended the boundaries of geography, ethnicity, and even time. .. Books were my teachers and guides; they became, in their way, a secular religion, one that has sustained and fed me when the harshness of life for so many has made it hard to embrace more conventional beliefs.

It is not an accident that so often an invading army’s first triumphant act is to sack and burn the libraries and museums. A people without access to its art and accumulated wisdom is indeed vanquished. It is significant that dictatorships make a practice of imprisoning dissident poets and novelists. Real artists—people who distill and communicate the truth, often at great personal cost—are the most dangerous figures in a repressive society. And that is why you are needed, desperately, now.

Don’t stop writing. And never, ever qualify what you do with the words “only,” “just,” or “merely.” Not even in your own head." - Susan O’Doherty, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself, she specializes in issues affecting writers.