Marjorie Clayman’s Writing Portfolio

Professional writing profile of Marjorie Clayman

Margie Clayman

I am thankful on an epic level

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My first year in the online world, I watched and observed the work Epic Thanks was doing. This year, I’m taking part.

The idea behind Epic Thanks, like so many wonderful ideas, is simple and pure, 100% concentrated power. Its engine is gratitude. Its motivation is getting everyone to be on that same plane of fortune.

This year, Epic Thanks is working to raise money for a new intermediate school for Mama Lucy and her Tanzanian school children, whom the Twitter world helped so marvelously two years ago. A $10 donation buys a brick. How much more tangible can you get?

But this Epic Thanks fundraiser is not just about raising money. It’s about filling the online world with love, hope, and gratitude. And so, before I embed the widget that will enable you to donate if you like, I’m going to tell you some things I’m thankful for. Even if you don’t donate, I would love it if you wrote a post of gratitude yourself. Maybe even include the widget on your site. That would make me grateful indeed.

What I’m thankful for

On a personal level, a dream came true – I got to visit Springfield, Illinois. I got to walk inside Abraham Lincoln’s house. I even got to walk by his outhouse. And yes, that made me feel joyful.

I’m also thankful that I was able to buy my first piece of real furniture, a couch that is difficult to get out of, especially as the weather grows colder.

I’m thankful for the new lives that have entered the world in my little circle of friends and family – Lily, Malcolm, and Leon are all gorgeous and healthy.

I am missing my Bubbin, Rose, but I am thankful that her fear and suffering are over.

I am thankful that I got to talk to amazing people on the phone this year whom I had previously only talked to online – people like Peg Fitzpatrick, Mark Babbitt, Mark Schaefer, Aaron Biebert, John Boyle, Cindy King, Dan Newman, and many others.

I am thankful that I got to meet my darling friends, Sean McGinnis, Lisa Petrilli, and Lisa Diomede for a fun-filled dinner. I am thankful that I got to give Geoff Livingston and Amber Naslund real-time hugs.

I am thankful that I have found a direction for my online presence that I believe can add some light and hope to the world. I am grateful to people like Chris Brogan, Estrella Rosenberg, Marc Pitman, and Stacey Monk who led me down this path.

I am thankful to David McGraw, who planted the idea in my head that gratitude is far too rare a species in the online world.

I am thankful that Gini Dietrich found me, liked me, and introduced me to other fabulous people like Kaarina, Amber-Lee, and Bill.

I am thankful to Jay Baer, who has done so much to support me online over the last year.

I am thankful for 12Most and all of the people associated with it.

I am grateful that my day-to-day existence is not hanging on the edge of a cliff like so many people are experiencing.

I am thankful that my past is merely a foundation for my future.

I am grateful that I can write this post and know that you, yes you, will embrace it and me warmly.

I am sending my gratitude out into the world. This is only the tip of the iceberg. And I use my gratitude to say, Hey, let’s get this school built so that Tanzanian kids can look back and say, “Wow, people really do care and they used social media to prove it.”

What could be better than that?

A thousand times over, I send warm wishes and hopeful thoughts to you and yours. Let’s spread this good word and bask in thankfulness.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eekim/2691580307 via Creative Commons

The Mirror Is Not Your Enemy

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As some of you may know, I have a very guilty pleasure. I’m ashamed of it really.

*sigh* For the last two years, I’ve been a loyal fan of Biggest Loser.

I’m not really sure what I find so addictive about the show, but lately something has started to bother me about the show, along with many other shows dedicated to losing weight. See, a lot of the people on these shows say things like, “Well, I just didn’t think I could do it because I was too fat.” But as they start to lose weight, they discover that they still are standing in their own way even as their shirt and pant sizes decrease. It wasn’t really their weight that was holding them back. It was their brains.

It all reminds me of a scene from one of my most favorite childhood movies, The Neverending Story. Atreyu, the main hero, needs to pass by a special gate that can determine your true value and worth. If they deem you worthy, you pass. If not, they zap you with their eyeballs and you are fried. Just like in the face of a mirror, even the bravest of warriors start to doubt themselves as they approach this gate, and not surprisingly, they get the wrong end of a laser beam.

Your brain controls what you see in the mirror

How many times do you see people go up to a mirror and say, “Aww yeah, I look GREAT!” Humans tend to pick at ourselves, don’t we? Women put on a little more lipstick or give out a sigh as we notice another gray hair or another wrinkle. We look at our pants which no longer zip so easily across our bellies, or we look at, well, every possible thing that we could find wrong with ourselves. But the mirror doesn’t REALLY magnify that stuff. The mirror doesn’t make us see that we are overweight or that one ear is higher than the other. We approach the mirror like those warriors approach that soul-piercing gate. We are expecting to see something wrong because we do not love ourselves enough.

What should you look for in a mirror?

The next time you go to look at yourself in a mirror, maybe before you go to work or before you go out to dinner, take a moment and ask yourself what you’re hoping to see. Don’t let that thought become negative, like, “Man, I hope my hair looks good.” What do you want to see? Do you want to see a person beaming with happiness? Do you want to see a person who looks like they’re in control and in charge? Do you want to see a person emanating confidence and security?

How can you make the mirror show you those things? Well, you need to look well beyond the stuff the regular mirror shows you. You need to look inside your head, inside your heart, and inside your soul. Your real essence needs to be grabbed from within so that it can show itself to you when you look at yourself. Once you have that core of yourself that you want, the mirror becomes inconsequential. You know what you will see. You know it will be beautiful. Your mind’s eye is what needs to be convinced.

A mirror, after all, is just a piece of glass encased in some hard material. Right?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shareski/3786803863/sizes/m/in/photostream/ via Creative Commons

Turn Cruelty Into Kindness

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It was my eighth grade year. The teachers had a fantastic idea. In order to teach us young punks about racism, they were going to try the “brown eye/blue eye” experiment. Essentially, this meant that in the morning, everyone who had brown eyes would be treated really well. In the afternoon, people with blue eyes would be the “preferred class.” Being a brown-eyed girl, the morning went by rather smoothly for me. I thought the experiment was a mixture of cheesy and interesting. Then, at lunch, as we segued into blue-eyed supremacy, a person stuck a sign to my back that said, “I’m too sexy for my height” (a play off a song that was popular at the time). My face got hot. I felt like I was sinking to the floor. People thought it was pretty funny.

Eventually, one of my teachers, without comment, came over and took the sign off my shirt. I remember that small act of kindness as clearly as I recollect the humiliation of the treatment I received that day.

There are many such stories in my past. While almost everyone has some sort of hard time during elementary and high school, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that my time was pretty darned yucky. If I unrolled all of my stories, you might find it weird that today, decades later, I am still trying to help people. As a friend asked me once, why would I want to help people when all I ever got was a kick in the teeth?

Three Ways To React To Cruelty

I have come to the belief that when we face any kind of cruelty, whether it’s just life throwing curveballs at us or other people doing so, there are three ways to react.

1. You can become angry, bitter, hard, and cruel yourself

2. You can try to drown your sorrows with drugs or alcohol or other escape mechanisms

3. You can try to make sure other people don’t have to suffer the same fate

There are plenty of reasons people choose any three of these things, but I’d like to make a case for number three, especially for here in the online world.

See, here’s how I look at it. As we come into the online world, we’re sort of taking off a layer of protective shield. We’re tossing our face out there, we’re tossing the way we write out there, and we’re tossing our thoughts out there. Regularly. Like, several times a day. While this is very brave on everyone’s part, it also means that we’re particularly vulnerable to cruelty and meanness in the online world. Our usual protective layer we carry offline has the slightest chink in its armor. It’s just slightly easier for arrows to get through.

In addition, a lot of people are using the online world to reach out for help regarding issues that they would never have discussed with anyone but a few years ago. Why is this happening? I think that people are feeling more isolated. Even though we have more ability to network with people than we have ever had before, quantity is overtaking quality when it comes to relationships. We no longer have that Norman Rockwell sense that our peeps are right there in our neighborhood, ready to listen to our woes and laugh at our jokes.

With all of this mixed together, the online world, just like our reactions to pain and cruelty, can become a terrible weapon or a great salvation.

Ways to transform cruelty into kindness

If you have a dark cloud that looms over your head, how can you possibly weave that darkness into something that ends up helping other people?

Mark Horvath was without hope and was ready to take his own life because he felt there was no way his life could get better. He now pulls on that sense of desperation, his familiarity with that hopelessness, to show others that they too can find their way to a better life.

Estrella Rosenberg lost her infant sister to congenital heart disease. Instead of merely lamenting or becoming bitter, Estrella started Big Love Little Hearts to help other families avoid that pain.

People like Danny Brown and Steve Woodruff have shared extremely personal stories about their own struggles so that people can see these struggles can be defeated, and so people can feel safe in expressing their own pains and sorrows.

Corinne Edwards used her devastating experience of losing her husband to help other men and women who have lost spouses get through those horrible first few months alone.

Nancy Davis uses her experiences of abuse to give hope to other men and women experiencing the same horror.

As for me, I know what it is to be perceived as the underdog. I know what it is to have that movie-like experience of having a whole bus of kids laugh just at you. I know what it is, in fact, to be thrown into a trash can. But because I know those things, I know that the feelings of humiliation and low self-confidence can be defeated. I know that you can triumph. I know that because I have. And so, I do my best to reach out to people who may feel hopeless and say, “Hey…if I can overcome a lot of stuff, you can do it too. I don’t know how yet, but you can do it.”

It’s not easy

The temptation to give in to the hurt and anger can be overwhelming, especially when the wound is fresh. You want to lash out. Why does this stuff have to happen to you? The same thing happens when it’s someone you love who gets hurt. Why them? It’s not fair. But there are people here in the online world who are waiting to hear that someone else experienced the same stuff they did. They haven’t found their way out of the tunnel yet, and they’re thinking there’s probably not a way to get there.

How can you reach your hand out and bring ’em on into the clearing? How can you turn the dark shades of your life into something neon and effervescent?

How can you turn cruelty into kindness?

First Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nobullshit/2336248538/ via Creative Commons

Second Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetonveg/5026716018/ via Creative Commons

Five Shining Stars Of Social Good Inspiration

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My new mission in the online world is actually ridiculously easy. I want to inspire people to use social media for social good. That means I can sit on my tush, sip a cup of coffee, and type. I wouldn’t have a lot to talk about if there weren’t people out there doing real things that are amazing, motivational, and inspirational, however. A lot of these people and groups are already using social media, if not as the core of their efforts than certainly to supplement what they are doing.

So, here are some people and organizations that really inspire me to do more to help make the world a better place. I hope you take the time to read up on what these amazing people are doing!

Founded by the glorious Estrella Rosenberg, Big Love Little Hearts has one key mission statement – end infant deaths caused by congenital heart disease. What I have learned from Estrella is that one of the most tragic aspects of congenital heart disease in infants is that preventative medicine and more education could be enough to save kids’ lives. She lobbies relentlessly to pass bills that would enable doctors, nurses, and parents to get better education about this disease, but more than that, her organization works to raise money to fund operations for children all around the world.

 

I found out about Mark Horvath and his organization, Invisible People, via Chris Brogan  about a year ago. With a past that includes hard drug use and near suicide, Mark Horvath    now spends his time and efforts giving a voice to the homeless. He travels around the country  and around the world videotaping testimonials of people who are living in the streets. He  gives them not just a name and a voice but a story. He is making homelessness personal for  everyone, one person at a time. Watch a few of his videos and see if you are not inspired.

The online world stands firmly behind The Blue Campaign, an effort to give a voice to the many millions of refugees in the world. It is easy to knock the idea of refugees out of our heads. We hear about refugee camps all of the time. In war, after natural disasters, all you hear about are people stuck in refugee camps, facing disease, emotional trauma, and more. The Blue Key Campaign keeps these people around the world front-of-mind. By the way, now is a great time to pledge $5 and get your own blue key!

I’ve already told you about Luma Mufleh and her amazing story, but in case you missed it, let me repeat it (because it’s worth it!). Luma Mufleh was born in Jordan and moved to the US to go to college. She got a job in a town outside Atlanta. One day, she took a wrong turn and came upon an apartment complex where shoeless children were playing soccer. After winning her way into the game by providing a new soccer ball, Luma discovered that the children were all refugees. They were extremely poor, some were nearly starving, and the educational system was letting them down. Luma took it upon herself to start a Fugee School, and now she is raising money to create a Fugee Village, where the children will be able to have a safe place to grow up and learn.

Here is what happens when you are on the path that you are meant to be on. I have become, how can I say, addicted to Breaking Bad, the television show, so as I tend to do these days, I decided to look for the actors and actresses on Twitter so that I could fangirl at them and say, “OMG I LOVE YOU!” Well, as fate would have it, Aaron Paul, the fella who plays Jesse Pinkman, is on Twitter. As fate would also have it, he was tweeting on behalf of a fundraiser for a group called the Kind Campaign (#BeKind). Intrigued, I checked out what this was all about, and it is really stunning. Watching the trailer of the documentary behind the campaign will be worth more than anything I say here, but the general idea is that the Kind Campaign is targeting the bullying that goes on between girls. It’s  a niche problem, but we have seen the tragic effects this kind of bullying can have.

These are just five groups doing amazing things to help improve the world, and we can all use social media to help them out. Who would you add to this list?

36 ways to use social media for social good

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When I was still a pretty little kid, the big Live Aid fundraiser happened. I didn’t really understand a whole lot about this place called Ethiopia, but I understood the pictures of the little kids, about my age, with distended bellies, vacant eyes, covered in flies. Rock band, rock band, rock band, starving children. Rock band, rock band, rock band, starving children. I sat there and started to get antsy. Sure, I could have figured out that donating money would have been doing something, but it felt like I needed to do more. My big answer was to start making those tiny little potholders on the plastic loom in an attempt to make blankets for those kids.

As you might imagine, that effort didn’t get very far.

That antsy feeling has stayed with me my whole life, at least so far. When I see someone in pain, I figure, well, might as well try to make it better. When I see a catastrophe, I’m hungry to help. And then suddenly this whole social media thing came along, and I thought, My GOD! We all have the ability to better the world, right here at our fingertips.

Our voices can span the globe at the speed of light.

Talking about using social media for social good is almost becoming a cliche. I don’t want that to happen though. I don’t want this concept to get watered down. I don’t want you to lose sight of what we can do with this amazing gift we have. So here are some ideas on how you can use social media to improve the world. Some ways are big, some ways are little, but every little bit helps.

1. Post what has motivated you to exercise to help motivate others

2. Post helpful, nutritious recipes

3. When you see a bulletin about a missing animal, share it.

4. When you see a bulletin about a missing child, share it.

5. When you see someone is feeling down, try to make them smile.

6. Find a charitable hashtag, follow it, and share it.

7. Retweet efforts to raise funds for not-for-profit organizations.

8. Retweet information that will inspire people to act.

9. Right blog posts answering tricky questions.

10. Answer a question for someone who is brand new to the online world.

11. Congratulate someone on a job well done.

12. Help someone else who is trying to do good.

13. Help someone else, period.

14. Write about how you overcame a major obstacle. It will offer guidance to someone else.

15. Go out of your way to talk to someone who has no followers on Twitter.

16. Share calls to action that you see charitable organizations broadcasting.

17. Start your own Facebook “cause”

18. Use your blog to highlight people who are doing social good.

19. Encourage those who are working hard to benefit others.

20. Defend someone who is being attacked.

21. Offer a kind word to someone who is being bullied.

22. Start your own online fundraising effort.

23. Share powerful photographs to get the point across that help is needed.

24. Share videos from people experiencing the worst life has to offer to motivate action.

25. Come up with solutions and toss them out to your networks without fear.

26. Donate your voice to someone who doesn’t have one, like animals, infants, or the mortally ill.

27. Raise awareness about issues people may not know about.

28. Start your own online project using video, photos, written content…all of the above.

29. Make it personal.

30. Consider the whole online world your own backyard.

31. Keep an eye on children and teens using social media.

32. Stifle harmful talk.

33. Open your mind to new ways of thinking – millions of perspectives are at your fingertips.

34. Offer hope however you can, whenever you can.

35. Create a group or a community around a cause or issue.

36. Believe that all of these things make a difference.

You might roll your eyes at some of these things. Helping someone on Twitter can make the world a better place? Sure. Why not? Any time we can lend a hand, we are improving the world for that person, right? And maybe, inspired by your act of kindness, they’ll be more inspired to lend a hand to someone else in some other way. You just never know what will be the difference-maker in someone’s life.

You have a voice. You have power. Anyone who has an online account has those things. The question is how you are going to use them.

Image by Horton Group. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/hortongrou

Help Me Help Guatemala

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Sometimes we meet people online and we are just shocked that we can meet such people. In my particular case, I was shocked when I met Nic Wirtz because I couldn’t believe what a curmudgeon he was 🙂 However, I am now shocked that I have the privilege of helping Nic with an absolutely amazing project he is working on down in Guatemala.

If you are not familiar with Guatemala’s history, the country, like so many in Central America, has been torn apart by war and violence for decades. According to Nic:

“Internal conflict” – 36 years
More than 200,000 killed.
160,000 in massacres
40-45,000 in forced disappearances – more than all other Latin American countries put together.
70% of Guatemalans are under 30 so they don’t have any recollection of that time, especially the most brutal period, the 1980s.
Media age in Guatemala 19.8
Nic, together with photographer and activist Jean-Marie Simon, is raising funds to create a new textbook that would include some of Ms. Simon’s photography from the height of the violence in  Guatemala. Nic and Jean-Marie do not want these young Guatemalans to lose track of what their country, what their parents and grandparents, had to endure as things get better.
How you can help

Nic and Jean-Marie have an extremely aggressive deadline and goal – they want to raise $14,000 in 16 days. The project can only move forward if we help them get this done.

We can get this done, right?

Just click to this Kickstarter page and make a donation. If you can’t do that, help me spread the word. Nic is extremely passionate about this and the way he talks and writes about it has been enough to kickstart me.

How about you?

Oh, and by the way – there are prizes!!!

PS, check out Nic’s thoughts about the importance of these efforts!

Image by Heriberto Herrera. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/boletin