If you are a writer you are one of the great people of history
On creativity and sensitivity and being awake
If there’s one attribute that creative people share en masse, it’s the gnawing doubt that what they’re doing is unimportant; that it’s all without meaning, yelling into the void, self-serving. That keeps so many of us from creating, from embedding enough pieces of ourselves into the world’s fabric.
This won’t turn into anything, I tell myself as I lift pen from paper, why would anyone listen to me goddamnit?
It’s ironic that the thing so many of us have been conditioned to hate most about ourselves - sensitivity - is the thing that’s driven so much of who we are as a species. Observing, assessing, trying to improve - seeking beauty, meaning, ways to do good, trying to express something meaningful in a way truly only you could.
There’s a singular person who’s lived the life you’ve lived, the only one whose perspective was built specifically like this. Only your traumas, your triumphs, your pains - you alone have experienced reality this way.
We have to stop treating sensitivity like a disease, like the desire to bare soul is there to be healed. Like other people’s opinion on what I create should override the art that I make. To remind ourselves that everything worthy that’s ever been created has been a person of great sensitivity putting their great vulnerability on display.
If you are a writer you are one of the great people in history. Be it in messages to the world or a journal only you’ll read, everything felt more deeply than seen, leaving pieces behind for someone else to feel, a stranger on the internet or just future me.
This won’t turn into anything, I tell myself while lifting my pen, this time only to take a deep breath and drop it back down again.