Where the way is dark & the bullets cold;

My protagonist (look, a big writing word! My English teacher would be proud) taught me something recently.

Let me introduce him first of all. He’s 45. Italian-American. Dark hair, black eyes, whiskers from here to the dawn of Time & muscle bound. He’s profane & violent. A gangster & a sociopath. Santangelo De Saviero is not really the kind of guy who teaches anything, unless it’s how to meet your Maker, quickly. He’s his own voice.

I have an inspiration board – which is really a piece of canvas with a lot of pictures on it – that I have above my laptop. It faces me whenever I write and is visible from my bed, so it’s pretty much always in my line of vision. It’s covered with pictures of Saints’ face claims, quotes, lines from poems, images of Vin, Maryse, Ronnie and others. It also has a picture of the Vampire Eric for reasons I haven’t yet derived. I tend to look up at it a lot when I’m online because of the angle it’s at.

I keep telling people Saint is his own character, his own person and I just get to write him. When I sat staring at the board recently I realised he really is his own person. I can’t write something in there if he doesn’t like it. I can’t make him cry because he doesn’t. I can’t change him to suit me (although I adore him as he is) or anyone else.

So why do we change ourselves to suit everyone else?

If Santangelo, whom I love, can’t be changed without compromising who he is, if I can’t take something from him without removing him, then why is it okay for me to do that to myself? Why do we constantly check ourselves against other people and wonder if we’re doing okay? Recently someone came back into my life that I’d rather stayed out of it. Once I knew they were back, it kind of threw me. I wondered what this person would think if we met again. We probably will just because we have this common thread. I knew they wouldn’t ‘approve’ and it annoyed me. Why did I need them to approve? I don’t need anyone to approve Santangelo. I don’t care if people love him or hate him. I’d like you to love him ‘cause I’d like to sell a book someday, really I would. But if you don’t, he sure as hell won’t shed no tears over it. But if don’t need anyone to approve him, why did I care what this person thought of me?

I like me. I do. I’m a writer. I have an insane sense of humour that often sees me cracking myself up, leaving everyone else looking at me dumbfounded. I’m someone who loves Dr Who, Star Trek and any other kind of sci fi you throw my way. I get addicted to things like Watchmen & The Losers & Supernatural & True Blood. I read obsessively. Most of my room is a bookcase. I love wrestling. I grew up with it & it’s a part of my life. I love muscle cars. I don’t act very ladylike. I will wear heels until my feet bleed because they look good, who cares if I can’t actually walk. My music taste stopped in the 1970’s. I actually like poetry. I would rather watch an action or horror movie over a romance any day. I don’t tolerate deceit. I can’t stand when people promise one thing and do another. To me, it smacks of what Paul describes in the Bible. People whose faces and voices say they love God but people whose hearts are far from Him. I really have a problem with that. I try so very hard to be a good witness, to be someone whose walk & talk match. I don’t always make it. A lot of times I get angry, a lot of times I get frustrated. But what you see is real.

So it burns me when I see people who seem to have this whole double thing going on. This particular person is one of those. They may or may not actually live that double life but everything in their actions screams it. This person is not a person I want in my life, not someone I want influencing it and someone I would keep at arm’s length, if they had to be spoken to at all. So when I discovered I was stepping back, just because I didn’t want to come into contact with this person, it upset me. I was almost hiding because I didn’t want to talk to them, to say what my life was like or what I’d been up to because I didn’t want them to judge me like I knew they would.

Santangelo made me realise I was being a wimp. A lot of people in Human Nature don’t approve of the Mob Boss. A lot of people are extremely vocal about it. He pays attention to the person that cares about him and shuts out the rest because they don’t matter. I read somewhere that the people we spend the most time worrying about are not the people who’ll be there in the end. I’d been pouring worry and energy into this person because I was almost afraid to go show them who I was.

I thought about how I liked who I was. After November/December last year, when everything changed - it was like I finally stepped into the destiny God was holding out for me – I felt complete, like I’d picked up the missing piece of my personality. I do enjoy the morbid and the arcane because it feeds what I guess Margaret Atwood would call ‘the other me’. I wrote a book I loved a series I’m still writing, stories that play out like movies in front of my eyes. I met great new people and I actually enjoy learning how to promote my book and myself as a writer. I love who I am right now. A 23 year old – 24 in 31 days – who was destined for more. Yet I’m limiting myself, stepping back from this person because I was worried what they might say, their reactions, of what might hide behind the plastic smile. Santangelo made me front up to that, to realise that I couldn’t fully step into everything if I was still hiding.

To quote my Mafioso, ‘F*ck ‘em. And the horse they rode in on’.

Don’t let anyone stop you being who you are. Don’t put up with people who bring you down. Surround yourself with people you love and forget about the people who don’t. Those people might have to be in your life for whatever reason; it doesn’t mean they have to own your life. You’re always going to have haters. People who disapprove of you, of what you do, what you say, what you wear, what you write, what you draw, what you sing, how you do all that. You will never match up to what their expectation of you is. You don’t have to.

God made you unique. He carved your name on His hand. He didn’t carve you as a hyphen attached to someone else.

Be who you are.