I can hardly believe that I’m moving on to day 7 after only one day on day 6 of the Armchair Genealogist‘s writing challenge. Today’s assignment was about the internal conflicts and desires as opposed to yesterday was about the outer story. I didn’t know that and at first I thought I’d done yesterday wrong but I think I wasn’t too far off after all. Lynn had us take a piece of paper and divide it into three columns. The first column I wrote down events from the timeline I did for my Dad’s Underwater Swimmers School experience. The next column was for his external wants and desires (the stuff I worked on yesterday) and the last column I listed my Dad’s internal wants and desires.

Here are the internal wants and desires that I wrote down:

• be happy
• have fun
• self-worth
• add value to society
• do the right thing
• help others
• have more options for the future
• be part of a team
• belong
• feel loved and accepted
• be valued
• self-confidence
• be something more than just a sailor

On Lynn’s suggestion, I did some more free-writing. Today’s topic was from my Dad’s wants and desires. I picked his feelings of inadequacy and feeling like he was “just a sailor”. I decided to do it long hand today since yesterday’s writing it straight into WordPress didn’t help me to not stop and edit some as I went. There is no backspace on a sheet of paper. It went better, I think. It is funny how crooked my lines get when writing on a blank piece of paper. Takes me back to childhood for some reason and writing crooked lines then. I’ll spare you (and myself) having to read the ramblings I wrote today. But maybe some of it will make its way on to my blog at some future date.