Unchain my heart

by Wesley
(Grand Blanc, Michigan)

Wesley A. Whittaker

I have been different my entire life. As a child, I made up wonderful stories even before I could write and entertained my friends and family. In school, I was in every play, editor of the school paper and excelled in writing classes. In 1975, I was nominated for a Best Actor award for the US Armed Forces in Europe. After my discharge in 1976, I auditioned for and was accepted into New York University's theater program. I did not go.

My parents did not support this path for my life. My father filled me with all the statistics of failed actors, starving artists and the enormous odds that were stacked against my success. My mother was a fundmentalist Christian fanatic who filled my mind with guilt over not using the talents that God had given me as a minister and visions of decadence and eternal damnation that surely awaited me at the end of that path. To keep the peace in my family, I chose to listen to them instead of following my dream. I spent the next thirty years making a decent living in a good steady paying job. I have hated myself ever since.

Even though I have written and produced a pretty good Christmas play, have had a monthly column in a regional magazine, written a couple screenplays and have started a novel, I have not felt creatively free my entire adult life. I feel like I abandoned my true calling, sold out for "job security" and find it very difficult to forgive myself.

I know that I have more talent than I have shown and I know that I have failed to deliver on my potential. I don't know how to get unstuck and turn it around. My heart's desire is to write, act and create stories and characters that touch people's lives and inspire them to be better than they ever thought they could be.

I feel like the man in the biblical parable who took his talent and buried it because he didn't want to lose it. Now I am in my 50s and feel like I have lost it anyway.

I am ordering that my writing abilities be unblocked and that my creative talent be allowed to manifest fully and flow.