I’m the only person I know who has a whiteboard on the wall of her dining room. Maybe other homeschooling parents have one on theirs, too, but I’ve never met them. Anyway, the board is there because my son (like his parents) is a “list” person. He has to have a schedule listed on the board in order to stay on task. But, the board also has a double function. It serves sort of as a riddle-maker for my daughter who leaves what seem to be cryptic messages on the board, and my husband—who is usually not privy to the conversation that sparked the message—gets a kick out of trying to figure out what our daughter meant.
Her note last week was: Stop Looking.
You, dear reader, do not have to figure out what the message meant, because I am going to tell you.
Last week, I surprised myself by watching The Woman King.
I thought I had no interest in the movie because I’m not into action films, and I will be honest and say that I fast-forwarded through the fighting scenes. But, I was so empowered by the movie that I watched it twice. Tossing out the violence, it was the theme of strong women and sisterhood that moved me. Another thing that stood out to me was the name of the tribe: Dahomey. The name sounded familiar. It sounded like the name of a plantation that I had seen only the day before while doing research for a new story. I thought, “Surely this plantation name has nothing to do with the African tribe.” But, I was wrong. The Dahomey Plantation, which is located literally just down the road from my hometown of Rosedale, MS was indeed named for the tribe from which the enslaved people had been taken. My first thought was, “The audacity!” My second thought was, “Was this meant to be some kind of honor? Or was it mockery?” Either way, I felt like it was a slap in the face to those who had been captured and enslaved.
The Dahomey Plantation was founded in 1833 by F.G. Ellis, who named it after Dahomey, the homeland of his slaves. The plantation became the largest cotton plantation in the world. -Wikipedia
While discussing the movie, I shared this information with my daughter. “Oh,” she said, “I’d love to make a documentary about the Dahomey Plantation. Let me know what else you find out about it.”
I began digging but found very little information about the Dahomey Plantation. That’s when my daughter said, “You can stop looking.” Then she did her usual thing of writing a partial message on the whiteboard.
As time passed, I continued staring at those words, “Stop looking,” as though they held another message for me. You see, I have a huge problem. I can’t stop looking at Goodreads and checking for reviews of my books. And I can’t stop looking at Amazon to see how my books rank among the millions of other books being sold on the site. So I took that message to heart and decided to discipline myself to STOP LOOKING. I need to stop looking, because looking doesn’t change a thing. Looking only makes me long for something over which I have no control: more reviews and lower sales ranks. Looking won’t change either of those.
Since LOOKING won’t move either of those needles, I might as well STOP.
Continuously looking at the stats for my old books is also a distraction from new work. So in order to move forward, I need to STOP LOOKING BACK. It’s not that I don’t care about my already published books, I just don’t need to be so obsessed with them that I don’t have adequate time to work on something new.
I decided to write this post as accountability for myself. If I put it out there for others to see, then hopefully I will stick to it and STOP LOOKING.
Just for the fun of it, here’s a note my daughter left on the board right before she left for a vacation in Los Angeles last summer:
I thought it was cute. I hope you do too. Until next time, “I’ll be Bach.” Soon.
Good words for me, too...Stop Looking! Write the next thing :)