Write Now - Silence Your Censor

Anyone who writes searches for their authentic voice. We recognise it when our writing sounds like we’re saying what we want to say how we want to say it. It’s a eureka moment, we know we’ve got it.

When we express exactly what we think and feel, sense and imagine we’ve crossed the rubicon. It’s irrevocable knowledge; once we know that, we also know when we’re dissimulating, hiding behind conventions or easy truths.  We know when we write the comfortable rather than the truth.

It’s every writer’s dilemma. An atavistic urge to express and assert a unique creative originality compels us to go public with our most private, unguarded, authentic thoughts and images. To communicate our inner world means putting ourselves out there. On the line, word by word. Vulnerable. 

We feel euphoric knowing that we’ve finally captured our dreams, thoughts, and feelings in words yet shiver from going naked and undefended in a world of judges and juries who are quick to undermine. 

Yet, a creative asks questions, narrates, observes, reports, notices, tells tales, imagines worlds, spins metaphors, connects, dreams, shapes. Doesn’t take the status quo for granted. Pushes boundaries to feel the learning edge, steps out of the comfort zone feeling so prickly and uncomfortable that they often cloak themselves in convention to feel safer and smaller, and diminished, there. 

We can choose how we travel from here. Towards fear with open heart and mind, or away from it, trying not to look over our shoulder in case it’s behind us. 

Or we can sit a-while and get used to it, consider why we’re scared, what this discomfort is telling us? Because it is telling us something, if we dare to listen and learn.

So often, rather than trust instinct and go with gut feeling, rather than embrace the novelty and adventure of it, we choose to test ourselves against known measures of success. And doubt our ability, worthiness, even our originality rather than celebrate our uniqueness and our utter individuality of experience and creativity. 

We start a conversation in our head and too often act as censor and editor in suffocating our emerging voice before we’ve learnt to speak. 
It is an act of faith to write. An act of faith and an act of creation to spin delicate thought-idea-word strands and word by word stitch stories, poems, articles, journals, blogs. 

This drive to create, express, document, rhyme, report, imagine, narrate, discover, uncover, examine, compare, and share will out. At some point in your life, early or late, you will out yourself as a writer. Boldly, shyly, apologetically, secretly, ashamedly, guiltily, defiantly, or gladly. 
You are the only person who sees the world your way. There is only one version of you.

I remember saying tentatively and quietly, trying it out for size, ‘Oh I’m a writer.’ A step further than, ‘Oh I write’; a deepening of faith. It’s like finally declaring that I’m a non-smoker who might have an odd cigarette (I never do but the permission’s there) rather than a smoker who keeps on trying to stop. It fits.

So, I am a writer, who might have an odd lapse and do something else but I will continue to go to the edge and explore, question, and share my experiences. 

I believe that what I have to say may resonate somewhere with someone, that it may spark a light that inspires a thought, an idea, a word. And which starts a new journey with a step in the right direction.