Unthawing: Reflections on writing + self
I pull up a blanket and cozy into the headboard which, today, serves as my desk chair, the pillow a most comfortable desk.
I stare blankly for what seems an hour. I am frozen in false expectations.
I’ve been told what people read, what is appropriate and what is fussy, what’s helpful and what’s self-serving. Today I am left with the detritus of those conversations, overwhelmed with the realization that somewhere along the way I became a willing participant in the cycle of consumerism. I am what I hate, at least from the perspective of a writer.
I made it my job to find what and how people wanted to read and then write those things. I literally made it my job as a marketer. There’s nothing wrong with it, really; it’s what makes content marketing work, what forms human connection to copy for brands, products, and campaigns. But I’ve grown to despise myself a little for it. I sold my soul, or at least my pen, and the payout wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
The truth is, this is all my doing. I cannot blame another person, or my company, or my various and changing circumstances. I must square up to the accusations I’m leveling and absorb the blows; I am guilty of manufacturing instead of creating. I am guilty of listening to voices that don’t understand the complicated beauty of my inner workings. Not only listening, but establishing guide posts with their words.
To follow conventional logic, I should not write precisely what I’m writing now. There is no digestible bit herein to scribble on a notecard, no digestible nugget for likes and retweets and link backs. I am revealing what makes me unknowable, or at least what elicits the all-too-familiar, “we just don’t know what to do with you.”
In short, I’m my own worst enemy…
… or just maybe—and this is what I’m hanging my hat on—I am my own way out?
Maybe the success of something isn’t in the shipping of it, but in the process. Maybe the value isn’t in the bullet points freely given, but in the mining, the laborious and time-consuming ways a thought can be cultivated like a diamond in the dark. Maybe clarity shouldn’t be primary when seeking to bare a soul. Perhaps writing doesn't need floaties but can call others into depths unplumbed. Perhaps writing can be industry, and therapy, and discipline, and illumination, and, and, and…
My fingers [and heart and mind and soul] are beginning to thaw from the expectations of others, and I type with more fluidity than I’ve known in what feels like ages, free from the restraint of performance. I am merely writing what is written internally, what is marking up my insides and reworking itself in constant motion and creation. I am beginning to rediscover creation. I create. I am creative, in lucrative and spellbinding and utterly confusing ways.
And it is good.
