What's important

Once when I was in high school (probably 16 years ago, like, how did that happen???) I reached down to pick up my hair brush and immediately felt like a needle was being pushed through my finger. A wasp had been hanging out on the brush, and it (bastard) stung me when I got too close.

Thousands (I'm guessing, anyway, because 16 years is a long time) of hair-brush picking up incidents later, and I've not been stung since. Yet I cannot touch a hair brush without that remembering that sting. Apparently, it's a defense mechanism we're built with. Our brains remember danger or hurts in order to keep us alive.

So it makes more sense as to why it's so easy to focus on the negative in life. It's actually less I'm-a-pessimist and more I-want-to-stay-alive, and it's kind of out of our control.

It's so hard to ignore the negative things in life. Sometimes it's for survival, but sometimes it's detrimental to our well-being and overall happiness.

So I entered DTR into this contest. I got my score sheet back on Saturday. The total possible score was 60. The cutoff to be a finalist was an average of 55. Here are my scores: 60(!), 56, 55...and 33. My average was 52.6. I wasn't a finalist.

I felt like a loser. I felt like my book sucked. My immediate reaction was to doubt everything about myself as a writer and, if I'm honest, as a human being.

It took about an hour for me to realize that the score of 33...a total outlier...didn't mean my book sucked. In fact, 3 out of 4 judges thought it was good enough. One judge gave it a perfect score, and (s)he wrote that that was a first for her(him).

My immediate reaction was to focus on the fact that I didn't win this award, and that this one person really, really did not like my book. But when I thought about it, 75% of the other people...people I didn't know and who weren't just filling my ear with what I wanted to hear....thought it was good enough. Great, even. And, even though I know that in a perfect world, the only approval I need would be myself, I have to face the fact that I need approval from others, too. And you know what? 3 out of 4 ain't bad.

Fuck that 33. It has nothing to do with my book, at least not when you consider the other scores.

So I'll enter another contest and maybe I'll win and maybe I won't. But I'll keep trying, because failure is part of the process.

Here's to hoping I can remember that.