Reading and writing are not only activities that are very central to what I do in life, but in many ways they are also outlets and explorations and challenges that make up the person that I am entirely.
I remember being a young child who paid attention during story time in grade school, who hated reading tests because they took the freedom out of enjoying a person’s writing, and who wrote short stories and read them to the whole class every week when I was 7 years old. I became addicted, in a sense, to the effect that words had on me and the effect that my own writing could have on others.
And as I grew into a young woman and it was slowly revealed to me just how hard life could be, I turned to reading and writing in a more therapeutic way.
There have been many, many times when writing out my own thoughts and immersing myself in the thoughts of other people have been my fundamental aids in making it through some tough things. I can say with full assurance that a huge majority of the good things about my life and myself would not exist without the steady input – and inevitably, the output – of words and phrases that so beautifully carry thoughts, emotions, and information from person to person to person.
I guess it was through this difficulty of living and the steady push toward a more serious level of writing that I started to get frustrated, and I have honestly been the most frustrated within these past several months.
How do you put your thoughts into words when they never seem to make sense to you in the first place? How do you strike the right balance between vulnerability and confidentiality? How do you cope and keep trying when it feels as if you are totally failing as a writer?
These are questions I still can’t claim to have the answers to. Because sometimes writing is just plain hard and there is nothing you can do but plow forward and try one more time, one more time, one more time. Sometimes there is nothing to write about and at the same time there is everything to write about. Sometimes you get these ideas in your mind of what you want a whole piece or even one sentence to be like, and then you can’t get the words and the feelings and the motivations to work together like they need to. Sometimes you pour your heart into an article or a chapter and hardly anyone shows interest in it.
To be completely honest, I have no earthly idea how to encourage a writer who is struggling like this. Maybe that’s the thing, though. Your passions and gifts hold much more value and significance when you decide to stop viewing them from the zoom lens of worldly gain and instead choose to see them with a wide angle lens, acknowledging that we should write for something (and in my case, for Someone) much bigger than the number of shares you get on an article or the number of books you sell or the number of followers on your blog.
Good writing is meant to have an effect – to change, help, inspire, challenge, and inform other human beings around the world. That’s what this is all about. Don’t lose sight of it.
