Naomi the Wordsmith

As promised, here’s the most recent entry in my diary for you, my most curious reader 😉

I never want to hide anything from you. So I’m going to show you all the funny little mistakes my ink-splotched hand makes. As they say, warts and all…

I’d take a pic for you, but my hands are hurting too much to hold a device today (the featured image is an old pic). I’ve got a better offer.

You get to imagine the page before you, all the mistakes and all the smudges. Zero glam-ups.

So bear with me – it’s not how I normally roll. I always do at least 3 edits and usually more.

As promised, here my diary is, revealed…

“There’s this trend of instead of doing New Year’s resoluti resolutions, doing a word of the year instead. And I kinda like that because my grand total of succeeded New Year’s resolutions is 0. I achieve a lot of my goals in life, but my New Year’s goals have never mattered to me much. They were goals I thought I should have, rather than goals I wanted to achieve.

“But this word of the year thing. I like it. I think verbally. It resonates.

“I struggled to think of any word that really felt right. Ther There’s just too manny many contenders.

“I want to be more creative. I want to be brave and dare to be different. I want to be productive. Focused. I want to write.

“Too many words. How do you pick one? Or even 3 or 5?

“But in the end I landed on this one – compassion.

“I want to be compassionate towards other people.

“Doing everything I can, especially with my writing, to help people. To always write to make the world better. Maybe through stories or showing people through copywriting something that might really help them. Help small businesses succeed.

“And I want to be compassionate to myself.

“You see, the thing about those other words – they’re not always realistic. To write copy demands creativity, but sometimes you’re not feeling creative. You gotta write anyway.

“Clients need you. I stick to my deadlines because they’re more important than waiting for a spark of inspiration that might not come for a while.

“But it’s hard. You feel like you’re squeezing lemon with a juicer but the juice isn’t coming. You’re squeezing harder and harder. Your hands are red with strain, blistered and hurting. But you’ve only got a few drops of juice for all that effort.

“It’s important to feel compassion for yourself, especially in the hard times. Especially when you feel like you don’t deserve it.”

Compassion rocks word of the year

Oof, that’s embarrassing showing all my mistakes right off to you guys. No tidying up with a shiny polish. That’s the raw Naomi.

Trying to force a giant sentence of writing onto the page, the words getting tinier and tinier as the space runs out…

And no wordplay either. I love writing wordplay, but it requires some editing (okay, a lot of editing) to really shine.

Anyway…

I think I’ll be okay with being compassionate for others in my writing – I like to think I’m compassionate. But I know I have areas to work on. As a copywriter, I need to understand the people I’m writing to.

I won’t always be the natural buyer of a product and compassion will help me understand those people better. I like learning about people (I’m nosy too 🙃 I think most writers are).

Here’s for some real touchy-feely vulnerability. I think the toughest part of this word-of-the-year/a-year-in-a-word thing is being compassionate towards myself.

I’m an over-ambitious perfectionist. And I know that is SO the thing that everyone rolls their eyes at. Like, ugh, I’m just showing off, right?

Thing is, though – it is actually a flaw. If I don’t stay focused on what matters, I can get lost in trying to finish an impossible goal.

Perfect really is the enemy of great.

It’s okay not to be perfect. It’s good not to be perfect. Everyone knows the ads that are airbrushed to artificial flawlessness – those ads are soulless. No one trusts them, or the product they sell.

Authenticity is king, and authenticity is in showing yourself, as you are, warts and all.

And sometimes, you’re not feeling 100%. It’s okay, when someone asks you how you are, to say “I’m okay, I guess”, instead of “I’m good!”

And even *gasp for all Brits reading this* to do the super-rude thing of saying “You know, actually, I’m feeling rather rough today. It’s not a good day.” The horror!

Compassion is how I’m planning to rock 2025.

Treat yourself, and treat others too.

Plus how cool is it that we’re exactly a quarter through a century? That’s just a cool milestone.

PS: Do you have a word of the year? If you do, do tell, so we can all be nosy together.

And PPS: If you do, I’ll reveal more about my runner-up words of the year – why I liked them and why they didn’t make the winning cut.