“What you hold onto holds on to you.”

This is a mantra that C.L. Harmon, author of In the Midst of Reality, lives by. His novel was self-published on Amazon in 2013 and is a collection of what Harmon refers to as mindsets. Mindsets are short works of non-fiction that reflect how Harmon sees the world as well as how to deal with and overcome obstacles in life.“They originally started out as dark poetry,” Harmon said. “Despite a perfectly normal and happy childhood, I became clinically depressed around the time I was 19 and I started writing these dark poems to help deal with what I was going through. Eventually, the writing morphed from dark verses to more positive creations.”

Mindsets are written to be relatable to people from all walks of life. They tackle not one, but many issues that people face such as pain, freedom, happiness and many more. The creation of mindsets helped Harmon to learn how to write and convey his feelings. His career goal is to use mindsets as well as his novel to help others.“There was a lady when I worked for a newspaper who called my superior one day about a mindset I had written,” Harmon said. “She said she did not normally read the paper but for some odd reason she felt compelled to that day and she read what I had published. She was a Christian and had recently lost her son. She talked about how she had struggled with his loss and that nothing, including her faith, had helped her work through her confusion and grief. But that day, reading my mindset, she managed to find the peace and resolve over her loss. And that made me so happy. It was my little incentive to keep going, knowing that I was making a difference in someone’s life and could do that for others.”

While Harmon’s work is deeply rooted in his personal faith, he does not segregate his writing to people that hold the same beliefs. He believes that every person has their own creator and path and his writing serves to influence people to find that path and pursue it.“One of my biggest goals in my writing was to ensure that I did not tailor it to just one audience,” Harmon said. “Whether you are Christian and believe in God or Jewish or belong to the Islamic faith, I want the message to reach and help everyone. Every person is so important and has so much potential inside them. They are able to create and do things that no one else can and sometimes I think they forget that. We get so caught up in our day to day lives that we forget that we can make a difference on our own. Every action and decision we make affects people and we choose whether it’s a good or bad effect.”

Harmon stated that he will probably continue to write mindsets until he dies. Second, only to raising his children, it is his most proud accomplishment. He believes that every person has talents within them and that they should use these talents to do what they can to better themselves as well as the world around them.

“I want my writing to affect people, but I don’t want them to think I am preaching,” Harmon said. “I don’t want them to think I am telling them to go out and do something. I want them to find the action within themselves. But I want everyone to have this opportunity. Even though I have published the book I have published many mindsets for free online for people to access. I don’t want to get rich on my writing. I want to be rich on knowing that I have helped others and that is a vastly different and amazing thing.”So what kind of change do you want to be?