Celebrate Your Individuality Today

We, as writers and creative types, often feel like no one pays attention to what we’re doing until a project is completely finished. At that point, someone can look at your book, story, poem, or whatever and say, “Ooohh! That’s great! Let me read it!”

(At least, we hope they’re going to say that, rather than just ignore that we created it in the first place. But I digress.)

Maybe it’s easier for some professions, such as athletes, to be celebrated and feted. Someone like Olympic gymnast Simone Biles of the United States, who can do amazing things on the balance beam or uneven parallel bars, can do something tangible, something that can be watched  and appreciated for years (on YouTube and elsewhere).

Even so, I’m guessing that other Olympic athletes, people whose names I don’t even remember, have gifts and talents of their own that are well worth celebrating.

After all, if you get to the Olympics, you’re an elite athlete. You have a special skill, or talent, that makes you one of the top athletes in the entire world, or you’d not be eligible for going to the Olympics at all.

That thought got me to thinking. (Even though thinking can be a dangerous pursuit, I think you should indulge my moment of madness.)

Every single person, whether we can see it or not, has something worth celebrating. There is some talent within that human being that is like nothing else; whether it’s for baking the perfect cake, writing the perfect melody, or coming up with just the right words to explain what’s happening in a scene for a book or play, that person has something unique inside himself or herself that has a great deal of worth and value.

Those other Olympians — the ones whose names I can’t remember — also have worth and value. (There was a Canadian gymnast, for example, who was performing a great routine on the balance beam until a major mistake. She kept going, but the sparkle was gone after the mistake…still, before that mistake, there was something there, something intangible but real, that showed exactly why she was at the Olympic Games this year in Rio.) Their skills matter, whether they’re skeet shooters or equestrians or runners; their training and sacrifice and hard work all matters, too.

I wish we could all put ourselves, just for one day, in the frame of reference of being akin to an elite athlete. We have something within ourselves that no one else has, that no one else can ever have, and providing we’re working on our skills, gifts, and talents, that’s all that anyone can ever ask from us — ourselves included.

So, what I’m hoping you’ll take away from today’s blog is this: You need to celebrate yourself, your individual gifts and talents and beliefs and desires, and appreciate yourself as much as you possibly can.

This world does not seem to care much, sometimes, about the enormous efforts you might put into your lives…but providing you do, it should all be worth it.