Catching Words
I made a goal to write more.
I took six months off from this space. I finished a first draft of a novel back in November of last year and haven’t touched it since. I kept telling myself that when life became okay again, when I could get out of bed without the heaviness, then I would be able to sit back down. I could get back to the work I loved.
It never works like that.
I’m sitting here in bed at 8:42pm looking at a blank piece of paper, trying to catch words outside of my reach.
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Quiet. Passive. Unimportant. Voiceless. Worthless.
I think these thoughts and I clothe myself in them.
I’m always going to be in the background, I think. I tell myself this is good. I pretend that I don’t care if anyone hears me. But then I go back to the media and the metrics and I know that what I really want is to be heard.
I think to myself that some people were put on this earth to have a voice. To lend it to others. To own a platform and live the success of numbers and comments and “you’ve helped me to stop feeling so alone.”
Some people were made for large numbers of friends and for charisma and for being the light in a room, too. I know that’s never been for me.
I was born with a passion to write but have never been given anything worth saying. Have an ego too eager for approval that it may be a blessing to keep it far away.
You don’t matter is always going to be a sentence I struggle against.
Your words don’t matter.
But maybe they would—maybe eventually they might—if I could just wait for them to come.
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I saw a Facebook post recently where someone asked her friends to tell her the biggest lie they fight against. Hers was that her voice wasn’t necessary.
She is an author with a platform, a popular blog, two book deals.
Her comment section was filled with voices admitting things like, “I’m worthless,” “I’m not important,” “I’ll never watch my dreams come true.” All the things my head is filled to the brim with, all the sentences I tell myself I deserve because I don’t want it badly enough. I don’t work hard enough. I don’t have the words worth sharing.
I’m not alone, I think. I might not be wrong, but I’m not alone.
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I’ve been told that blogs don’t matter. That if I was a serious writer I wouldn’t share snippets of thoughts on the internet. That sharing these thoughts is self-indulgent, egotistical. They might be right—I wouldn’t listen even if they were.
I may never be read by anyone other than my sister and best friend. I may never “make it” as a writer or be recognized as one of the voices of this generation. I may never know what it is to have success as a writer. And that will be a disappointment.
But I can make a goal to show up. I can make a goal to write more. To sit in front of the blank page and fight against the part of me that believes my voice doesn’t matter.