sophiaclaire

the f word

Oh the f words.

In this case, not fuck which is my most favorite, but fear and freedom.

My nightmares boil down to not being _______ enough. Good creative fit pretty successful… enough. Whatever it is, it’s not enough. Great, so I know that’s my fear.

“Not enough’s” cause some problems, but mainly they’re super annoying and, at this point, fucking boring.

I have found an upshot to my enough issue though: I push myself. Granted probably not enough. ha. ha. ha. But when I look at how I’ve devoted 3 years of near daily 5AMs and stuck with it to hammer out my first book, and this just on the side of the job son yoga working out friends dating reading yes Netflix etc, I have to admit, I’m a fucking badass.

So this fear of never being enough has a way of propelling me forward. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for this. At all. I’m saying after a half a lifetime of self-observation, I can see where my “issues” are allowed to serve me. If I am aware (enough) I can use them to my advantage all the while telling them to fuck off when they’re getting old. And this is where I find freedom.

Because here’s the deal, we are all affected by fear. In one way or another our behavior reflects that. Whether you are better at hiding it than I am doesn’t matter.

What does matter is knowing: what’s your brand of fear? Do you yell in the jungle of fear like a ripped Tarzan? Dive under the covers on the couch with spoon, chocolate ice cream and Love Actually? Or, and this may be worst of all, frolic in a field of colorfully flowering lies? Oh, I’ve been there, done all that and more, trust me.

Follow the behavior. Find the fear. You don’t have to make it public, you just have to out it for yourself. Free it, know it, hear it and use your brand of it to your advantage. If you can harness your fears, they will not control you and that is freedom.

If you don’t, know that’s ok. YOU ARE FREE TO CHOOSE! The consequences are not big and dark, just karmic and cyclic, they come back around till we move through them.

Wake the fuck up

A boss of mine once yelled at me in a moment of heated aggression, “Your learning by doing is not working out!” I laughed and said, “Yeah, I hear you man, but it’s all I got!”

I’d like not to care about what you think wearing my Golden Goose sneakers and black Alexander Wang dress. But truth is, I do care.

In this series of blogs, I brought up dating because it’s super awkward, hope because it can lie, subtext because it rules us like our unchecked egos and a rap because of all of the above. They’re part of the striptease of revealing yourself (as an artist) regardless of how many layers come off.

This is learning by doing.

Part of art is that it needs to be experienced by someone else in order to close the circle of the exchange. Of course the journey and the doing are vital but if I write a book and no one reads it, what’s the point of the book? Without a reader there’s no relating. Without feedback, regardless of the feedback’s flavor, you have no clue where you stand in relation to what you’ve created and that’s where the juicy stuff is.

That’s also where I used to stop. Imagine, I let one professor’s negative feedback shelf years of poetry, because I gave a fuck. But here’s the deal, precisely because it takes an other person, things will be unpredictable, maybe even messy. You’ll push a boundary, cross a line, expose a limit. And possibly, if you’re lucky, even trigger his and hers matching shit.

Don’t let the way other people may react stop you from acting, otherwise you’re cheating yourself of half the experience.

People will not like it. People will like it. And I want you to think about this, at least it helps me press publish, most people will not even notice or care because we’re all too worried about our own shit. We’re not even looking at yours!

So grow a pair! Keep doing it and for fucks sake, keep sharing it.

(Anatomical Heart Image from a Vintage Science Book circa 1884, The Graphics Fairy)

Yeti

From my character Drake B. in Pericardium, his song Yeti.

She came out of the place

tits all dressed up in my face

she plugged me into her now

she was my first taste

I shoulda known all along

she smelled too good to be true

fairytales are for losers

stuck in 2D on flat screens

I shoulda been… a comedian

shoulda been… a doctor

shoulda been… a geographer

shoulda been… a fuck’n Yeti

one two three four

I just shouldn’t have been me when she broke my heart

(Anatomical Heart Image from a Vintage Science Book circa 1884, The Graphics Fairy)

Hope

What’s your take on hope?

I see hope as four letter word. A straight up cuss word, at least when it comes to love. In this excerpt India is about to find out whether her and Straight are a match.

“Something in the way I looked made Straight smile.

Our glance met in the middle and hovered over my next step. Detached was what I wanted to be but I bounced off my inner walls like a rubber ball set into motion in a glass box.

I took a deep breath and looked at him one last time. Hope. One single four letter word held by definition all of my skewed expectations intact. I gently placed my fingers on the prototype.

Instantly everything slowed down, the light dimmed, the smell got knocked out of me like a gust of cold wind and I had to catch my breath. I held on to the table as a sound so intense rushed through my ears. I felt gravity pull me closer. As I brought my eyes to meet his, I saw the bright yellow glowing string of words stream across his chest…”

(Anatomical Heart Image from a Vintage Science Book circa 1884, The Graphics Fairy)

Pericardium

Subtext is a bitch. No matter what you do people will pick up on what you don’t say. I don’t care if you believe it or not, pay attention to this for even an hour in any of your interactions and you’ll recognize it.

Get clear on what you’re not saying or that’s all that will be heard. Say what you really mean, no matter how hard that may seem.

An excerpt from my book:

“Picture this: park of the Town Art Museum, Bale and Devi’s wedding day, the after-party. Some of the guests had already left but not enough of them. I ran on stage, took the microphone and to the sixty odd people present, I accused Straight of making “the worst mistake of his life.” I screamed, literally in punk rock glory, that Charlotte, his “shit bag fiancé”, was a “serious fucking bitch.” Oh and she was standing there. She eyed me in her pink flowery dress, her dark chocolate brown locks falling over her bare ivory shoulders, her arms crossed at her chest like she smelled that I loved him. Mom saved me by sweeping me away before it got too epically tragic, but I was up there the length of a short song.

What I screamed to Straight was true. And to be clear we all thought it, I was just candid enough, or drunk enough, to say it, granted I could have worked on my delivery. I wanted to come from a place of friendly advice but alcohol and unrequited love did not let me. My punk rock urging changed nothing – it passed Straight by. My subtext stuck though sullying our friendship. Subtext always speaks louder than actual words, which was why Pericardium would break every single social rule, spoken and unspoken, if that subtext could be interpreted. I called the next day to apologize but he didn’t pick up. We hadn’t talked since. Those two minutes of drunken candor had paused a seventeen-year-old friendship.”

(Anatomical Heart Image from a Vintage Science Book circa 1884, The Graphics Fairy)

Texas

(If you don’t like cussing you might want to skip this one)

So let me tell you about that second guy…this hottie mother fucker from Texas.

Texas turned out to be my sexual shaman.

Over the years many men have crossed my path, all teaching me something I needed to evolve. But Texas gave me the missing piece to the whole puzzle: the gift of a pure sexual awakening. Sure, I’ve had great sex but he made me feel like a goddess, who doesn’t want that?

While it was “just sex” it was also so much fucking more. The body can be “touched” on many different levels: physical, emotional, spiritual… with Texas I could hit’em all, so clearly, we had some chemistry.

Many aspects contributed to my awakening but so this doesn’t turn into an unfinished novel I’ll concentrate on these:

Unattached. From the get go we established just sex. Why was that good for me? I had to check all my preconceived notions of a relationship at the door. That he would never be “my boyfriend” took my ego out of the equation completely. Allowing me the space to be myself. Texas turned out to be my most honest relationship to date because I was unattached to the outcome.

Hot. With smoking charisma, a sense of humor, amazing eyes, great sense of style, tattooed biceps, hard muscles in all the right places, a porno cock and a matching libido, what was left besides unadulterated YES!!! ?

Before I get too distracted ruminating over those details, what makes this all so important?

I’m a truth seeker. I’ve combed the depths of my consciousness under Socrates orders to “know thyself.” And while that’s all great, spending the last few years spiritually growing into a more conscious woman, writer, mother, friend and cookie baker (or whatever), I pressed pause on a huge part of life: sex, really fucking good sex. I didn’t need to wait for a Knight or a Douchebag to get some, all I had to do was own my creative sexual feminine power.

And I got lucky. So I was looking for something else on tinder, so what. Christmas came early and all over me.

(Anatomical Heart Image from a Vintage Science Book circa 1884, The Graphics Fairy)

two months on tinder

I used to think online dating wasn’t for me. And it still isn’t. I gave myself every single good excuse not to do it. But guess what? Nothing changed in my love life either.

I needed a change or my epitaph would read: she died under-fucked and unpublished. Really, I couldn’t have that.

So I decided to grab my love life by the balls (pun sooooo intended) and made a profile.

By the time I was swiping away, it felt like an adventure in a 3^rd world country, all the unfamiliar eyes staring at me, my swipes mostly tending towards “no way’s.”

Eventually, I actually got matches, chatted with maybe 30 guys, literally felt like I dated all of them (an empathic introverts cross to bear) and finally I met two men in person.

Drum roll.

The first guy I met was one of the more awkward 47 minutes I had had in a while. The second guy, well now that’s turned out to be a good story. (stay tuned for that one on my next nano-blog!)

While I didn’t find what I was looking for on tinder, I did happen to find exactly what I needed. I wonder how often we might not recognize that the experience in front of us (no matter what that might be) is exactly that which helps us get further. Don’t we all wear glasses that filter our day to day experiences with what we already think “should” happen (for good and bad), as opposed to watching the story unfold as we go?

What’s wrong with finding what we’re not looking for? Nothing.

If you want something new you have to do something new. Remember, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, so do something different!

Have you been wanting to make a change? Write your own epitaph!

(Anatomical Heart Image from a Vintage Science Book circa 1884, The Graphics Fairy)

The Journey Begins

There’s this saying, you probably know it: start before you are ready.

I have “not been ready” with this first blog post for my new website a good year. I could tell you what made me not ready, but you have heard it all before, because we all have reasons (possibly even valid ones) why we do not act on what we want to do. The reasons don’t matter though. I have waited a year to be ready and it has made no difference. I could die never having been ready to take this next step. I will be mere ashes if I keep waiting and so will you.

So bring to mind the thing(s) you have wanted to make happen. Could be anything. For me it’s getting my first book finished, published and out there. Imagine this wish could be granted, like for real, by asking your fairy godmother. All she needed you to do is take a step in the direction of your wish, just one step, and with an elegant wave of her wand and some sparkly stardust the wish would be fulfilled… in time.

Would you take the step? Hell yes! Because the fairy godmother guaranteed the wish would come true. And you cannot win if you do not play!

So never mind that the step may require doing battle with whatever reasons (fears) you had for not doing it before. Oh the reasons, the fears, will rear their ugly heads, trust me, and they get even meaner on the eve of the step you choose to take. You must act anyway. Even if the worse fear came to pass you would still be ok. Remember, the fairy godmother exists, the wish has been granted, and seriously all you have to do is take action. I will prove it to you by example. I dare you to join me: start before you are ready.