I have not devoted much time to Wolfe in the last couple of years, but today’s post is about strength of character.
Strength of character was considered admirable post-war, as everyone’s lives had been touched by horror one way or another. It was understood that one does not have to be nice to do something good, and that it was more important to stand up for your core beliefs than to be popular.
This appears to be a mystery to more recent generations.
When I fell in love with Wolfe
many years ago, it was very much a choice. His staff had been horrible to me, for no apparent reason, he, whilst fascinating, was fairly trivial and the stories about him were horrific at the time. I was working very hard on a very heavy book, which I have since not continued with due to massive self-doubt, and I was at a loss to why I found him compelling at all.
However he was a productive muse, and I enjoyed our brief spats, and when all the horrible stuff started happening I could not understand why. The woman referring to herself as the Avocadess appeared to think there was some sort of heirarchy that I should be aware of, and as I live in a different continent I did not really understand why it was relevant at all.
So, rather than doing what most people do, getting offended by the poor treatment and carrying on being very serious and under the radar, I started to ponder how to react to the situation positively.
This led to years and years of self-evaluation, and a basically constant gouch on Wolfe, which has led so far to this website, 35 titles, constant development work and eventually I went to meet him.
I was effectively neutered, because I was so busy thinking about how I could be good enough to meet the challenge of Wolfe effectively that I no longer wanted to participate in a relationship with anyone else.
You could look on it that I was in a situation where I was getting nothing from the several relationships I had at the time, I was not in a position to move on because I was taking care of my mother, and if you were particularly negative, perhaps as a result of watching TV and telling yourself you were over the hill, you could say I had given up. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am in the fortunate position to be hit on regularly by men young enough to be my son, despite not being particularly beautiful, on the basis of unusual levels of vibrancy.
So, basically what I am getting to with this is – you always have a choice. You can choose to wallow in your inadequacy, you can choose to hit out at other people, you can choose to be a small, nasty, self-serving individual, or you can choose to evaluate your behaviour, ignore other people and develop to the point where you are able to rise above disaster.
I chose, rather than doing what most otherwise intelligent people do and hating Wolfe and everything he stands for, to effectively fall in love with him for several years until I understood why.
And the reason? Strength of character. Wolfe has been through an awful lot, his background was not happy, he made a lot of mistakes, he has messed up far more times than you or I. His material is often gathered rather than produced, and he has been in trouble several times. And yet he still stands up and gets on with it. He spreads information that people would not seek for themselves, and in my case he gave me the self-confidence to pursue a line of research I would otherwise have kept very much on the back burner. I am now in the business myself.
That is not, however what I have to thank him for. What I have to thank Wolfe for, is for very cleverly putting together his overall presentation to tell you that the bottom line is getting it out there. What other people have to say about you is of absolutely no consequence whatsoever.
An author this morning tweeted at me that I had started a hate campaign against him. This is because he wishes to imprison a gay man for hitting on him. This author lacks the grace or capacity for the generosity of spirit necessary for a happy life.
His followers are astonished that they have spammed my facebook page for several days, and got nowhere with persuading me that persecuting a gay fan is good because this author is very moderately popular with them. The mean IQ is not high, needless to say.
Nobody has spammed him, and all I have done is simply disagree with him.
The reason I put this with the rest of the post?
Strength of character. Get some. Most of the time, the herd is wrong.
