Writer

For most of my life I have thought of myself as a writer. It’s the descriptor with which I most identify—more than the names that come with family roles, the titles given to me by various employers, even my given name. The self-appointed title on my business cards is wordsmith, since editing is another part of my freelance work, but at the heart of everything, I think of myself as a writer.

It’s been a long time since I attempted a blog post, and lately even a Facebook post is almost more than I can manage. I’ve been busy and stressed and overwhelmed and depressed over issues large and small, all of which interfere with my ability to write, but which make it all the more important that I try to write.

I am pretty sure that I don’t really know what I think about any given topic until I start to write about it. The dance that happens between my brain and my fingers, typing out my thoughts, is what helps me find clarity. If I can read them back to myself in sentence form, my thoughts make more sense to me.

Writing also informs me of how I feel, and maybe that is why writing is always a struggle, even on the good days. Writing is emotive, and it takes a bit of courage to wade into the emotional swamp and feel all those feels. It’s admittedly cathartic, and I’m certain that the best writing has emotion in it, but it’s not a lot of fun to plumb the depths of my soul, especially if I’m having a bad day/week/year/decade already.

And the things about which I seek clarity these days are painful issues that seem to have no resolution. Shootings in Orlando, politics that seems angry and petty, terrorism, wars overseas that wash up broken humans onto our shores…so much sadness, beyond comprehension. And then there are my personal struggles and concerns: worries about my kids and my job, concerns about my church and my community. When I write, I hurt, and still nothing changes.

But the journey is the destination, is it not? I publish my little blog offerings as a form of therapy, and while I love feedback and the affirmation, the writing is the thing that gives me life.  I cannot be who I am—a writer—if I do not write.

Great writers counsel us wannabes to just keep writing. Go at it every day. Not everything will be wonderful or even good—much of it will be discarded. But the habit of writing, like any other good habit, will pave the way for great things to come, or so they say. You certainly can’t run a marathon without proper and consistent training, and you’ll never write something worthwhile if you haven’t cultivated writing as a discipline. So that’s my goal: commit to a schedule where I write every day.

Writing is hard, even on the days when it’s not. It doesn’t matter. We all need to do hard things sometimes. And while I doubt that anything I write will change the world, I do know the process changes me, and perhaps what I write will be of help or value to someone else. And maybe that’s enough.