It’s quite a day when you finally realise that the only person standing in your way is yourself. It isn’t the gatekeepers of the publishing world, it isn’t the quality of your own work, it isn’t plain bad luck, it’s very simply You.
I have spent nearly ten years figuring out what the point is, trying to understand why it is that I am here, what it is I came to achieve and how it is that I go about that. I know in my heart I’m a writer. It’s the one consistency in my life, the one thing that pulls me back no matter what else I try. From the poems I wrote as a child, to the songs I wrote as an adolescent, then the stories I wrote as an adult, they were all words that yearned to be brought to life in a way that only I was able to express them. Me. And yet for years I have sought approval, validation that I am worthy of the words I write and the way that I write them. But the validation has always been sought externally, when the only one who really needed to validate me was myself.
And this I believe is an affliction across the creative board. It is why us creatives seek solitude and hide our light under our own self-deprecating bushels. And there are many out there; unrealised talent that were it not for the paralysing fear of just wanting to be accepted for who we are, would be filling the planet with such beauty and authenticity that humanity could not fail to thrive and grow. It is the one true voice that should be sounding above the noise of all that tries to control us; both through our own doing and that of the collective.
Because that’s what I’ve come to realise -– the noise ‘out there’ is just a reflection of the noise ‘in here’, but on a larger scale. Inside me is a microcosm of all that is, packed into this perfect body that I move around in. The wars that rage, the sickness, the dissonance, the polarity, the doubt, the fear; it’s me on a grand scale. But there is also love, kindness, compassion, service, honour, humility, grace… the list goes on, and when it’s the positive bits about myself that I focus on rather than the negative, so that will be reflected into the world outside of me.
For years I felt the need to prove myself and that the only way to achieve that was to go through official channels, as if that would authenticate my writing, my talent. As if acceptance from one or two people out of the billions on the planet assured that the billions on the planet would recognise my worth. But one day I realised there was only one person that needed to realise my worth and that was me.
When I finally recognised all this and began projecting the authentic, confident, self-assured me into the world, so I realised that everything I needed was right here. I had the material already written, waiting like a patient child to be an expression of my true self. I have so much more in me that wants to express, and I now feel empowered to continue creating without expectations of what I think should be the end result but what I know from deep inside my very being. And I encourage others to do the same; throw off the self-inflicted expectations, the out-dated paradigms that dictate the how and the when. We are creative beings that came here to create in the only way each of us know how and by our own perfect design.
Don’t hold back for anything or anyone – be the one you came here to be.
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