Paradise without that "IT"

Over the years I've known people who could walk into a room, turn heads, and fill up every corner with their presence. Charlie Waters, fullback in the 1980's for the Dallas Cowboys, was one. At the end of my performance evening at the Clock Tower Inn in Rockford, Illinois, one night (I was a single-act singer/musician on the road then), Charlie and I walked into a packed all-night restaurant. A hush came over the room and every head in that restaurant turned to stare at him. He was wearing a white long-sleeve dress shirt tucked into tight jeans, but I don't think it was his clothes or his fine-looking a__, and I don't think they were looking at me, or even us, even though I was in my salad days then. No, they were staring at him. He wasn't from those parts. How could people recognize him from the helmeted football player the size of a pinhead they watched on their TV screens? It was his presence. He just had that "IT."

Dillon Anthony Shifferly, a professional ballet dancer, is another man with a presence. He was young, only19, when his mother was my roommate in Canton, Ohio. He is tall, knock-out handsome, with that magnetic presence and a personal grace that allowed him to greet old-lady me with a warm hug, like a friend he'd known all his life. 

In a songwriting presentation I attended in St. Augustine last year, Janis Ian tried to explain how to enter a stage. I wanted to tell her that all the stage-entering, room-entering lessons one could take won't work if you don't have that IT. And that IT is not arrogance, and one doesn't have to be celebrity to have IT, because IT isn't based on recognition. Instead, the way a person is able to focus his or her energy (but I'm not sure how to define "energy") might be the key.

I'm not an "IT" person. In fact, from the way people ignore me in public places, it's possible I'm invisible. I've also proven many times over that when it comes to decision-making in companies and groups, I have no credibility. Even when that elusive crystal ball was sitting squarely in my lap and I absolutely knew the future consequences of the decisions on the table, no one would consider what I had to say. 

I've also learned not to even try to describe a creative project to a boss, client, or friend, whether it is an article or song I'm writing, or my plans to paint my bathroom or landscape my yard. I've learned to write the proposal, or just do the project and present it in its draft form.

I'm not whining. I'm just writing down what has worked and not worked for me based on factual results. If what I've written above is true for you, and if you've spent your life believing you are not worthy of notice because people don't notice you, keep returning to what you already do well, and just let yourself love doing it! Someone somewhere might appreciate your work, but that's an extra flair beyond the happiness you have already been gifted through your creative process.

Writing saves me. It takes me into a place inside myself that can organize my thoughts and express them in a cohesive, orderly fashion that (sometimes) holds together logically and teaches me who I am and which of my random thoughts bombarding me are valuable and beneficial for me. Writing songs is the ultimate ecstacy! I don't have to have "IT" to be in paradise, and neither do you.