My Hope for This Book

The Not-So-Lost Soul Companion
by Susan M. Brackney

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If you're anything like me, then you live with a fairly insistent urge to create and to make an indelible impression on the whole world. There is, in my case, the small matter of not really knowing what it is I was "meant" to do.

Truly, I never thought I would amount to anything at all. Besides eating candy, petting animals, and taking naps, one of my favorite things of all time is to help other creative, interesting people figure out what might make them happier. So if I can better enable you to share your painting, music, acting, filmmaking, or whatever it is that you live to do in the world, then maybe I've done something worthwhile.

I've spent years trying to make a mark of my own with my mixed-media artwork, not to mention this project too, and I can tell you what's been working so far and what hasn't worked at all.

I suspect you are capable of greatness. To that end, I humbly offer some ideas to help you succeed — keep in mind, this is my kind of success and not the kind most everyone else thinks about. Did you make someone else happy? Did you touch someone else with your work? That, to me, is success. Are you able to spend lots of time doing what you love to do? That is happiness. Maybe you are even able to partially — or completely — support yourself with your art. That is true contentment.

This book is for Lost Souls looking to prepare themselves for public consumption (and, by the way, sometimes it really does feel like you're being ingested.)

So I say this to you:

It's time to do Great Things . . . but how?

The Dreamy Bits

To Flounder or to Flourish?

A couple of years ago I found myself sitting in a little cafe in Santa Cruz, California, with no job, hardly any money, and no idea what to do next. I was surrounded by successful-looking people, and I was feeling especially unsuccessful on that particular day. I drew this map of possible Future Plans:

The fact that I had no idea what to do with myself was nothing new. I've always been something of a Flounder-er.

Everyone flounders from time to time. Some Lost Souls are naturally flounder-y people. They may be highly creative and capable of great things, but they may also be indecisive, filled with insecurities, and very discouraged about The Future.

Here's what I wonder: Is there really anything wrong with a little floundering? Maybe flounder-y people are just dreamers who don't want to settle for ordinary lives. Maybe we are capable of so many great things that we can't possibly choose just one. And who said we had to make a permanent selection anyway?

So maybe you can choose a little something for now. Just to start with. Want to publish a book of your own poems? Direct your own short film? Have an exhibition of your paintings? Just by picking something (and it can be a really small thing if you like) you've already become a little less floundering.

What's the difference between floundering and flourishing? Not much, when you think about it. To flourish, you have to think carefully about what is important to you and imagine what you hope to accomplish. To flounder, you have to imagine all the ways you can fail and all the disasters you are averting by remaining completely inactive and undecided about Everything. So both require a good imagination. That means if you are good at floundering, you can be good at flourishing too! I think the first step is allowing yourself to think clearly about what you want to do and what you think you can do.

The next step is to be very, very patient, because good things take time!

A Few Famous Flounder-ers

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Agatha Christie, George Orwell, and Kevin Williamson, the guy who wrote the movie Scream, suggest to me that it's perfectly okay to be somewhat unstable. From others' points of view, they may have looked like flounder-ers, but I prefer to think that they were simply building up to their Great Flourishing.

In the case of Emerson, he spent a lot of time and energy working to become a minister, and in 1826 he began a very distinguished career in the Unitarian Church. For a few years he was very popular in the Church and he made lots of money. But after the death of his wife, Ellen, he developed serious religious doubts, and he decided to give up his ministry. Despite illness and dispiritedness, Emerson set out for a goal he could not see, according to biographer Robert D. Richardson in his work Emerson: The Mind on Fire. He left his house and sold all his furniture. For the next ten months Emerson bummed around Europe trying to collect himself. Of course, to his concerned friends and family, he looked like a Grade A Flounder-er. (Freaking out and quitting a cushy job is never easy to explain to relatives. . . .)

Richardson explained, Emerson's new life seemed to those around him only a new failure. His family was disappointed. [His brother] Charles clucked that he had done too much "for the expression of individual opinion." Aunt Mary thought he was in dangerous waters indeed. Leaving the Second Church in Boston was a repudiation of the world of his father. Emerson was also giving up institutional affiliation and support, a guaranteed social position, and a generous and assured salary. But these same facts, from another perspective, bespeak a kind of victory, a freeing of himself from the confining forms of church and state, a chance to begin again, to live entirely — and literally — on his own terms.

Upon his return to the United States, Emerson began lecturing and writing. In his late thirties, Emerson released his first books. It was the start of his new calling as a transcendentalist thinker. I think Emerson was just patiently evolving into what he was meant to become.

Hopefully I am too.

Agatha Christie also evolved. She had been bent on a career in music — studying singing and piano in France — until she realized she was much too shy to perform publicly. She had never before considered becoming a writer, and even after she'd been published, she didn't see herself as a writer for a very long time. Originally, her sister had challenged her to write her first work, which was subsequently rejected by six publishers. A seventh would accept her manuscript and, at the age of thirty, she became a published author. She wrote countless mysteries, novels, and plays, including Murder on the Orient Express and The Mouse Trap, and she has sold more books than anyone except Shakespeare.

Although George Orwell claims he always knew he wanted to be a writer, he had difficulty getting there. He hadn't had much training or experience writing, but after resigning his position as an officer with the Indian Imperial Police, he set out to write. During the years spent refining his craft, Orwell washed dishes in Paris, taught private school here and there, and worked in a used-book store. When his first novels and short stories went unpublished, he destroyed them. (Imagine how this must've looked to outsiders!) Nevertheless, he pursued his creative work with a quiet intensity and independence that eventually led him to succeed with the publication of his political and literary observations and the novels Animal Farm and 1984.

Copyright © 2002 by Susan M. Brackney. Excerpted by permission of Dell, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Susan Brackney lives in Indiana with her rescued cockatoo, Puckitt.