09 The Gift of Pain (and a Request for Ideas)

Yesterday, I posted a first version of my “secret” survival plan.

The plan rested on the crazy idea of writing a book to save myself financially.

Objectively, it’s a bad plan. It’s a throw-spaghetti-on-walls plan.

I mean, no one reads books anymore. Not like they used to.

But I can’t sustaint normal work hours, so this is it.
 It’s do or die.

Good news is, I think I can do it. Because, for the first time in my life, I have something meaningful to say.

When I took stock of my survival assets yesterday, I missed perhaps my greatest asset of all: my incredible suffering.

Suffering starts out as a blight. But if you can find meaning in it, you can transform the blight into a gift. And the greater your suffering, the greater your gift.

My suffering is awful and hairy. So much more then, can the gift be. And so beautiful the children the suffering can bear.

This thought helps me cope. Helps me keep suffering.

I always liked writing. I wrote for fun. Tens of thousands of pages to date.

But it was crap—all of it. Now I realize why.

I’m not at all a great writer. But worse than that, I had nothing to say. Nothing that mattered.

Now I have something to say.

And its due to my suffering.

To be clear, these first two blog series (letters and log) aren’t the gift to others that I had in mind.

This gift will be the story I’ll post in my third “art” blog series.

And if my spaghetti is to stick, then this story must go viral.

But it mustn’t go viral due to clever marketing or SEO engineering. Instead, it must earn its viral-ness.  It must be so compelling, so moving, so uplifing that when someone reads or experiences it, they want to share it immediately. It has to be like that. So good, it’s crazy.

I have an idea I’m working on, but I’d like to know yours. So I have two questions:

1. What is the most moving and emotional literature/writing/music/movie that broke your heart and made it soar?

2. What is a piece of elevating art that doesn’t exist yet but you wish it did?  (There are no stupid answers!)

Please, either privately or publicly, share your thoughts. Thank you.

By the way, I’ve given myself a 6-month deadline to make this happen. The clock is now ticking…