I've started writing a journal/blog/diary so many times before and it’s never worked.
I get distracted. I overthink it. I write the first entry a hundred times until it feels perfect, in hopes that one day when I become a bona fide ‘author’ my small group of fans will find wisdom and style in my thoughts as a young artist. Or that my children will read my words some day and find a piece of themselves in the woman their mother was.
What begins as something for myself, quickly becomes about everyone else.
When I started writing, so many years ago, it was for the pure pleasure of it. Just for me. I loved creating stories about people like me, and people not at all like me, and to learn about who I was through their journey. To examine the tangible desires of my heart and the fears of my muddled mind through the narrative of someone I’d created from nothing.
That sizzling high of flying through paragraph after paragraph, when the words are coming so fast that it hardly feels as if they’re your own, is as thrilling as anything I’ve ever experienced. Creating worlds and lives and conflict and love. It’s what I imagine magic would feel like, if only I could find Hogwarts.
More than reading, which itself is a magical experience, writing is like harnessing a spark of godliness. You decide who lives and dies. You decide which loves are lost, which are found, and which go unrequited. You create the vehicle through which the reader experiences your imagination. It is at the same time humbling and empowering. It makes you feel alive in a special way that only creation can.
But over the years that inner critic has grown stronger. She reminds me of the eyes of the world, just waiting to tear my work apart. She says things like, “It’ll never be good enough.” and “You’re nothing special.” She scoffs at the roar of creation living within me and tells me to keep my day job. Because if I can’t make my living this way, then there’s no point… right?
Sometimes she makes me ashamed of my work. It’s not original. It’s too wild. It’s not polished. There are people who won’t like it, don’t you know that? And how would you survive if someone didn’t like it?
Best to focus on something safer. Like your number crunching job. You can handle something simple like that, now can’t you?
Well I am making a vow right now, however fragile and unlikely, to write in this place for the sole purposes of self-discovery, passion, and the raw wild beauty of art.
No self-editing.
No second guessing.
Just freedom.
Everyone deserves a place in the world where they can be honest. I think I’ll start here.
