Completely Disheartened

First, I have to apologize to you, readers, because this isn’t going to be one of my typical uplifting and positive posts. In fact, it’s going to be the dead opposite, and yet, I’m working toward a positive ending—a silver lining—if I can effectively bring my thoughts full circle.

After this week’s rollercoaster news coming from the media, I’m feeling completely disheartened. I’ve made it a point here on this blog not to share my political views on anything, and I’m sticking to that. However, the fallout of the national political climate leads me to a couple of disheartening conclusions, I’m afraid. And that conclusion is about our state of decency in this country and the way we communicate with one another, especially with those we disagree.

Whatever your political alignment, emotions run very high at times, and people forget that we are rationale human beings with the power to clearly articulate facts rather than solely using emotions without getting ridiculously overheated and then going for the jugular with offensive language and borderline lies that are misrepresented, and often times, can be completely untrue. The Twitter storm of both angry people and those feeding misleading information is alarming. I don’t like when people or the media tell me how to think. I like to think I’m smart enough to educate myself on issues and to draw my own conclusions.

So here comes the full circle attempt and the reason why I do what I do on the side–that is, embrace being a fictional storyteller. When people ask me why I write the stories I write and publish them, I can answer that question with one sentence, and it’s even truer today than ever:

I write the stories I write to put something positive into the world; there’s already enough negativity out there already.

The beauty of reading fiction is that it’s meant to be an escape from reality for a bit, from the general negativity that can float into our lives, either consciously or unconsciously. I enjoy escaping into crafting my stories as the writer, and I hope readers enjoy escaping into them, as well.

So while I remain disheartened by some of the things I see and read as an avid consumer of news, I remain an optimistic person, because there are many of us out here who feel the same way. I will continue to write about people in a positive way. Negativity and anger have the power to seduce us if we allow it. I choose to learn from it—turn away from it—and carry on in a way that puts some distance between it and me.