🧶 the way it is.
To write or not to write - that is the question.
The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothin you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
- William Stafford
It’s funny, the truths we run away from our whole lives but can’t escape.
The good ones don’t chase, but they also don’t abandon.
My relationship to writing is one of those truths.
I’m still not sure I consider myself a writer. The writing that brings me the most joy and meaning and flow I don’t do for public consumption, but rather for personal understanding. But being a founder complicates that. Especially in our age of “founder-led” comms.
And I’m thinking, maybe that’s when all the trouble started.
I. I am a writer.
Six years out from the terrifying first months of Covid, it all feels like a fever dream. Like: did we actually stay 6 feet away from each other and drop our kids off to school outside and hang masks from our rearview mirrors and isolate ourselves in our homes with only the made up rituals of zoom calls and weekly clapping to mark the time?
Yes, yes we did. I still feel the dissonance of those months. It was some of the hardest, but also some of the most intimate time I’ve spent with my kids and my husband. And through all that, I found myself turning inwards, with nowhere to put all the thoughts that would have otherwise gotten out through idle chitchat with friends and my team and strangers.
Needing a hobby to distract, I decided that I would invest more time in something that I’ve always wanted to do: being a Writer (note I didn’t saying: Writing).
And so I got a writing coach and I joined a writing group. I started penning essays.
I think they were pretty good.
There was just one problem: I never published them.
Why? I don’t know - I would write them and then share for feedback and the feedback would be good but then I would lose steam on wanting to spend the time necessary to properly edit. So it would languish in that unspace of possible and published.
But still I persisted - I figured that’s what being a writer was - penning pieces that gave some insight to my reader. And I just wasn’t good enough yet. As I moved more fully from my own blog to Substack, I felt the pressure to publish “something worthy of reading” mount even more.
I had never felt pressure around my writing. Vulnerability, release, joy. But never pressure. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong.
II. Maybe I’m not a writer.
My first writing was always for myself - in my journal. A deeply lonely kid, I had my books and my thoughts. But I needed them to go somewhere. Because I see now that I was actually not a quiet kid - just one with a lot of big thoughts and questions and no place to really ask and explore them.
So I built myself an outlet and taught myself how to reason through all the messy as I poured it onto a page.
I also learned that by voicing the worries and the anxieties, I could see them and render them less viscous.
My writing was a refuge. Simple the act of writing was meditative in a way that I was simply drawn to do.
But I also loved words - learning new ones, playing with unfamiliar ones. I loved learning them in other languages and forms, like sign language or code.
And I would look on reverently at Authors. People who had been so blessed as to have been asked to commit their insights to eternity within a book.
I see now that I was worshiping the wrong idols. The love was pure and true. The object was not.
III. Every hero’s journey needs a reckoning.
It's the hero finally admitting what they already half-knew and had organized their life around not-knowing.
I don’t do transitions well. I’d like to think I’m getting better, but I am at my core, an obsessive personality who needs a focal point. While I intellectually understand the wisdom of “taking time” between things, I struggle deeply with the reality of it. My skin feels itchy and my mind races and my body just sighs in resignation.
Purpose fuels my sails. And right now my sails have been hanging slack - a state I’ve learned is “being becalmed”.
I know I need to be patient. To really understand what direction this next chapter will go in. And to do that, I’ve needed to learn how to sit, dead in the water, and listen. And wait.
And it’s here that I found the thread that has always been with me. The one that I’ve realized I’ve been gripping just as strongly now at 46, as I did when I was 8.
I thought my thread was my mission for equity and for building. It’s not. It’s seeing the truth in what is, imagining what might be, and building a bridge that connects the two.
That’s the real thread that binds all that I’ve done before, and all that I hope to do in the future.
IV. Bearing witness.
Just the act of writing this piece has uncovered truths that I’ve not been able to see clearly.
What I know: I’ve been using my writing for the wrong thing for me - I’ve been trying to construct arguments and persuade. My writing is not how I do that. That’s conversations for me.
My writing is for resonance. For seeing everyday truths and pointing them out. My writing is for noticing. And bearing witness.
And for that, I don’t need to write for anyone else but me. But I publish because I think one of the most powerful things in the world is shared experience. Shared wisdom. Shared insight.
Sharing joys and sorrows and truths make them resonate in way that they never could, locked away inside.
So I publish. I don’t know if I’m a Writer or not.
I actually don’t care anymore, I realize.
But I do care if I’m sharing truths honestly and frequently enough. Not caring about the process or the result.
My only imperative:
Never let go of that thread.
love this. write write write!