IWSG: I Wish I Were…

~ J.S. Pailly

Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and cohosted this month by Ronel Janse Van Vuuren, Pat Garcia, and Liza @ Middle Passages.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Well, then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.

Each month, IWSG asks its members a question, and this month’s question is kind of a strange one:

If for one day you could be anyone or *thing* in the world, what would it be?  Describe, tell why, and any themes, goals, or values they/it inspire in you.

I wasn’t sure how to respond to this question at first, and I was considering skipping it and talking about something else.  But then I got thinking….

I’m pretty unhappy at the moment: unhappy with the state of my personal life, the state of my art/writing progress, the state of my financial situation, the state of my country and of the world at large….  Given all that, there are plenty of other people I’d rather be right now.  Transforming into an inanimate object doesn’t sound so bad at the moment, either.

But despite all of the problems I’m facing, there are a few things I wouldn’t want to give up.  Chief among them: my stories.  The weird, Sc-Fi worlds I’ve created inside my own head.  All the characters (humans, aliens, robots, etc.) who inhabit those worlds.  No matter what, I wouldn’t want to give any of that up.  I especially do not want to give up the two or three new story ideas that popped into my head within that last few months.

And the thing is all of the story worlds I’ve created are the product of my experiences.  My good experiences, my bad experiences.  My hopes and dreams, my successes and triumphs, and also my failures.  My disappointments.  My mistakes.  Swap my life with the life of somebody else, replace my experiences with the experiences of another person, and those stories wouldn’t be the same.  And the two (or maybe three) new story ideas that I’m currently working on… the ones that I am most excited about right now… they wouldn’t exist at all if not for the particular blend of fears and anxieties that I’m dealing with right now.

So despite everything, the only person (or thing) that I want to be right now is myself, because I am the only person who can tell the stories currently sitting in my head.

P.S.: Okay, after writing this whole post, I reread the initial question and realized that I’d misunderstood it.  I missed the “for one day” part.  If I could become someone else for just one day, I’d want to be an astronaut on the International Space Station.  I think my writing would benefit from me knowing, first hand, what it’s like to be in space (provided I got to go back to being myself the next day).

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Published by J.S. Pailly

14 thoughts on “IWSG: I Wish I Were…”

  2. I agree. I’ve often thought about what my life would be like if I were someone else or just if I had done something differently when I was younger (and there are oh so many candidates for change!). But I realized that given the laws of physics and ideas such as chaos theory, any change in the past could dramatically affect — good or bad — where you are today. So I would not swap places with anyone, nor do anything different in the past — even those with bad results — because you can never guess the long range consequences. I would not even do it for a day if it meant going back in time. No worries there, though, because in my thoughts reverse time travel — at least on a macro scale — is impossible. Unless you believe in bifurcation of timelines, which I don’t.

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    1. I think we all indulge in a little “what if I could change the past?” thinking from time to time. But I’ve read enough Sci-Fi to know it’s a bad idea. And also, it’s good to step back and appreciate, from time to time, that even the bad things that happen in life often lead to something good.

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  4. I’m with you on not really wishing to be anyone else. I realized a long time ago that the grass is always greener on the other side. The people I admired when I was young often turned out to have flaws I wasn’t aware of, or had their own struggles I wouldn’t want.

    For one day, I agree on the ISS astronaut. Although a case could be made that it would be better to do the day they launch, or maybe the day they return, to get a wider range of experiences.

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  5. Oh, JS, I’m sorry that you are going through a tough time right now. I hope things get easier very soon. I would love to visit the ISS or the moon. I love space, but I wonder if I might react like William Shatner when he finally visited. Happy creating!

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    1. Thanks, friend. I’ll be fine. I’ve been through worse things and come out okay, and I have a better support structure in my life now than I did in the past, too.

      I’d be happy to go the the I.S.S., or the Moon, or Mars, or wherever. Even if it freaked me out a bit, it would be super cool to do that. More importantly, it would be an experience I could use in my writing.

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  6. Hi,

    Your post is marvellous. Today, I read it and I felt like it came from your heart. You discovered by writing the post that the things you are going through are the fuel that empowering you to write.

    Stick with it. You are on the right track. All writers experience these things.

    Shalom shalom

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