Pretend

Pretend....Hey, that’s for kids. Not quite what a grown-up would do.

I beg to differ with you. Actually, I grew up thinking that pretend was for kids too. I wasn’t quite clear on when it stopped being pretend and took a more disastrous turn toward lying or craziness, but it did. So, I stopped pretending.

I thought that was what everybody wanted. And so, I grew into an adult.

My impression of being an adult? Not that much fun. First off, nobody trained me to be an adult. The only adult job training I got was somewhere in middle school; one of my teachers taught us how to write a check. Never mind balancing the account. That was for grown-ups. But I could write a check.

I did know where babies came from, so that was helpful.

I learned how to drive a car, but that didn’t happen until after I was married.

I entered the job market, and life moved on.

It wasn’t until I was about 30 years old that someone told me, “Pretend.” At the time, I was trying to learn how to be a psychic. Face it, working in an office had never been a real dream in my books. It was a way to pay the rent. It was a way to buy food and a car. It was practicality at its finest in being an adult.

But where was the joy? Where was the fun? There just wasn’t any. At least not then. It was years later that I found the joy in working in an office. The office never changed. I did. Which actually turned out to be one of those incredible life lessons a person might learn.

How to change your circumstances by changing yourself.

That could be another article. This one I’m talking about pretending.

At the same time that I was trying to learn how to be a psychic, I was also trying to be a writer. Neither plan was working all that well. It was during that time that I took Julia Cameron’s course, Awaken the Writer Within. I didn’t attend a class or a symposium. I read her book. I learned about morning pages. It was there that I was introduced to my inner artistic self, and it was there that I got the idea of pretend.

The last time I remember pretending was sometime in middle school when I wanted to practice kissing. I just didn’t have a clue. So, I closed my eyes and pretended a suitor for myself. He actually looked sort of like a cowboy. I ended up kissing my arm. I mean, how else are you going to practice? Kiss the mirror? Even I know at 71 that was a stupid idea.

So, everybody who ever told me that pretend was a child’s game was wrong…wrong…wrong.

When you get a new job and don’t know shit from Shinola? You pretend. You also observe and try to listen to everything that is going on around you. But in the end, you are only pretending until you are not.

So, I pretended to be a writer, and I pretended to be a psychic. I had advice from lots of places about what to do. Not much of it worked for me. So, I have my own advice now that I am a writer and a psychic (since 1993).

Pretend.

For writing, there are two good rules to follow. Write every day, even if it is only 500 words, which is about a little more than one page of  “normal” typing. Right up to the end of the line above where I said, “until you are not.” So, that’s one rule.

The other rule is that you write about what you know. Granted, if you’re a young writer, you probably don’t have a lot of life experience under your belt. For instance, you might never have been fired from a job. I have. Yes, the experience was unpleasant, but I learned something. First off, I could say I’ve been fired. So, there was that. Also, I realized I could survive it.

Consider that you can gain experience by reading. It counts. The research you put into any subject will count for experience. My father used to call people who did that armchair experts. He said it in derision, but I found it is actually a thing, and it is actually helpful.

When you are pretending while trying to be psychic, you need to use your imagination. I waited for visions to happen. I had to help mine along until they actually became visions. Maybe it’s like a muscle. Think of the coordination you need as a child to learn how to walk? It’s like that. You take it in stages. Baby steps. First, you need to learn to pull yourself up. That means you’re sitting on the rug in the living room. You’ve already mastered the art of crawling. You are a champion crawler, but you can’t see the sofa. There are toys up there. The dog is up there. You want to be able to see what’s going on. So you haul yourself up, hand over hand, on the sofa until you are standing.

You knew something was happening up there. You might have tried 25 times to stand up. Finally, you did.

With writing, you just keep writing. You learn to listen to yourself. You ask yourself questions. You learn how to listen. You learn how to observe. You read a lot. I mean, you read a lot. You learn how other people write, what their characters talk about. If you’ve never driven or ridden in a buggy, you are hearing from other writers what it is like. The jolting. The trying to balance yourself without grabbing hold of the stinky man in the corner with tobacco juice leaking out of his mouth, and all the while holding on to your bonnet. Do you think I’ve ever done that? No, I have not. I just pretended it in my head. Why, the lecher just reached for me. Talk about unnerving. What an awful man.

You get the idea.

I would even imagine that pretending is important for scientists. Of course, they could also be skewing the results of an experiment if they are expecting something to happen and miss the actual happening of something else. It’s like thinking everyone is…. whatever. You fill in the blanks. Sort of like now there is a good portion of the population that thinks everybody in California is a nut job. Just on principle. You can miss out on a lot of life by practicing stinking thinking.

Just don’t give up. Take another step. Try again. You can do this. I did it. I know you can too.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.

Pauline Evanosky
Talking to Spirit