I’m the sort of person who works through things in conversation. There’s something in the process of explaining a problem to someone who is actually present and can respond that makes my brain shuffle all of the information. I think it’s the shuffling and re-examining as I explain something that generally brings breakthroughs. Sometimes sending someone an email about it will work, but more often I need someone actively responding. Partially this is because I tend to attempt to adapt my explanation for my audience. So when I try to explain it specifically to one particular person in a way my brain thinks is the best way for them… I bump my thought process out of whatever rut my problem-solving attempts have been stuck in, or sweep back the curtain on stuff I’ve been ignoring.

Your own brain is the most powerful tool you have for influencing your own world. It does things you don’t even realize. You’re constantly constructing your own universe at a very basic level through what you knowingly and unknowingly perceive and process. And more importantly, so is everyone around you. Now before I get off on a tangent about why being able to read snatches of thought from people around you would be nearly useless because of this…

I suspect it is pretty obvious that I had a major breakthrough in why I wasn’t finishing a bunch of short stories and such in my Conversation with Ryan last week. Friday I was stuck in a train station for 4 hours and didn’t actually bother to find a wifi password and spent the entire time working on getting all of my writing up to date in my computer and MAN do I feel better. That isn’t to say that I finished all of them, but I know how to proceed on all of them now and why I’d been scuffing my feet and waffing about. Now that I know it is a control freak reflexive thing, I can take a deep breath and slowly rappel down off the bridge rather than dangle from the harness below the decking wondering why I’m not going anywhere when I’m not holding on to the rope. (Uh, I suppose it would help to point out that a rappelling setup when done right automatically stops you if you aren’t actively pulling the rope into a release position.).

I’m feeling much better about writing. Editing has been going great, but new composition has been slow at best and I’ve been reluctant to work on anything cause nothing was going. It’s good to realize I have a default safety position to keep writing from going out. That’s sometimes useful, but most of the time something I’m going to have to deal with consciously.