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).