For the most part, our sometimes weekly newsletter has been a little home for lengthy thoughts. After taking a few weeks off, I realized that just like instagram, sometimes I put stuff on there that should be on here. With that said, last week I sent out this note about claiming who you are. It was titled “Shout it!” And a few weeks later looking over a personal project that I’ve been working on, I thought it was even more fitting to post in this space.
Here are a few words on shouting it, whatever it may be, from within you. A perfect thing to do on a perfect Monday.
“Last year this time, I sat in a cafe on the west side and repeated these words; I AM A WRITER. I squirmed on the inside. My spine felt as if it crawled up my neck. My mouth felt like cotton and I could barely get that sentence out.
i am..
i am a…
“Just say it,” she said
I am a writer.
“You really need to believe it,” she persisted.
I AM A WRITER.
I’ve always known I was a writer. I had spent my childhood filling composition notebooks. And for years at that moment, typed things on my blog. But I was surrounded by real writers. Women and men who had actually finished college. People who spent their days in various fellowships, and their nights reading the work of others. They had it, because they had always claimed it. I didn’t have it because I was too much of a wimp to actually claim it. Because in part, I was ashamed that I dropped out of college for the very thing I’d always felt called to do.
I had split my time in this space where people never talked back to me, typing words into an abyss and then having strangers comment on occasion. Only to still feel as if there weren’t real eyes planted in my corner. And to this day, over warm goat-cheese-filled waffles where fruit oozed out of the center, I internally squirmed when asked that awkward and at times, invasive question; “What do you do?”
It came out with this new kind of confidence. And while I spend hours upon hours typing away on the computer, so much so that it seems I’ve caught me a bum wrist, the reality is; sometimes you just have to shout it from the longing “to be” inside of you. Whatever it is. Even if it is something you don’t like about yourself.
Shout it.
Claim it.
What the world needs now is more honesty, and more people content in their paths so that they can contribute to the greater good and forward movement. We need more truth. And my belief is that this starts within ourselves, the squirming, awkward, eye-twitching, PLEASE GOD DO NOT MAKE ME SAY THIS selves.”
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