#MondayWithAimée
Lovely morning, sweethearts!
I dont know about you, maybe you take stories less seriously than I do, but let me tell you about how I manage stories in my head. I spend a majority of my daydreaming time, which has always been a lot of time and has increased in the past few months, thinking about characters that already exist, because characters are the best part of good stories in my opinion. You can put them in any situation, time or place and they’re easy to play with. In my head I worked on them so much that I made them come alive. Which means that in my head, these characters, they’re kind of mine. They started from someone else’s mind but I’ve adapted them, just like a lot of others did too.
Anyhow, I spend a lot of my free time daydreaming with my best imaginary friends. Yes, you have the right to find it weird, but it’s a great way to never feel lonely with yourself.
The other day, I was thinking about my favorite one, let’s call him Steve (that’s actually his name, I don’t know why I said it like it was a fake name to protect his anonymity, he’s fictional after all). He’s trustworthy, loyal, kind and compassionate, a great leader and he cares deeply about his people. He’s a great person and he’s a great character, especially when well played. Plus, he’s very, very handsome. Irresistible. Sorry, I’m getting distracted here.
Anyway, this character is great. In all his stories, he makes the right decision, sacrificing himself for the greater good and for his people. Throughout his story arc, he shows how trustworthy he is. But in his last few lines of his stories, he messes up. He does something that is so out of character that it just seems fake. I’d simply put it this way : it’s out of character. And it made me think a lot.
Because sometimes we are the same way. We do something out of character, something isn’t us, and we and people that know us notice. It feels wrong and usually, it does wrong. It hurts someone or it makes us take a few steps back. We, like we were those characters, take a decision that is slightly out of line and a while after, we realize how much of a misstep it was.
It’s okay. It happens, you can’t always take the right decision, and you probably took the best decision with the information you had at this moment. Maybe something rooted deeper was altering your decisions and you didn’t realize it until you dug. It happens. My character messed up because a writer messed up his story. (I’m actually aware that they aren’t real, so there’s someone responsible for their action, I’m not that deep in denial, fear not sweethearts, but please, follow me anyways.) But in our case, we are both the character and the writer. We are both responsible and victim of our choices. And sometimes, we make hella bad decisions.
There’s no way to erase the action you made. It’s done. But there is a way to repair the broken vases and apologize. And rewrite. Rewriting is key to everything, because just like a good story, you can’t always come up with the perfect pitch on the first time. Allow yourself to fall and fail, but allow yourself to forgive yourself and others and rewrite. When you write in pencil and erase and write over it, there is still a sign that you erased. The paper cannot be magically turn brand new again. There is traces of the things you wrote before, the paper is a little bit more worn, but but what matter is what you wrote over it. It’s the rewriting that matters, because this is what stays.
Maybe you did something out of character like my lovely Steve did. Doesn’t mean we stop loving him, doesn’t mean we stop caring for him. He is still a human we love, and like all humans, he makes mistakes. If we never accept apologies and forgive, we will never grow. We must accept that others make mistakes sometimes and that it hurt us, but if they want to redeem themselves, we have to let them be. That counts for ourselves too. We are human and we make mistakes. If we want people to forgive us, we have to forgive ourselves first.
I hope your story is a good one, my sweethearts, and that you allow yourself some space in the margins to comment and rewrite. You are allowed space to breathe and rethink yourself. This is what we are trying to do here, give you help to rewrite yourself and keep working on your story. There is always our Facebook and Instagram page you can go hang out on, we would love to see you there for sure.
Warm tea and bonfire nights,
-Aimée.
