Writing for myself

Writing is an art, but it is also exhausting.

You take something from inside yourself, create something that did not exist before, give it a shape, breathe a soul into a collection of characters, and somewhere in that process, a writer ends up revealing both the best and the worst of himself.

Not necessarily because he wants to let things out.

Sometimes he writes because he feels he owes it to himself.

Lately, I had been writing mostly about my hobbies, my work, and things that had very little to do with me personally. I had become almost a third person in my own writing and, in a way, I had forgotten how to create for myself.

I wrote for my Bitcoin community. I wrote for my family. For my work. For others.

Always outward.

I am going through a period in which my own personality feels like it is changing.

For the past few months, I have been working on my emotional, spiritual, and mental well-being through psychology, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, and tantric meditation.

And every step feels like meeting myself again.

I do not always like what I find.

Because it forces me to look at uncomfortable things within myself.

I have broken down so many times in such a short period that I have no doubt this process has only just begun.

While writing essays, articles, papers, working on my master’s thesis, and leaving another book unfinished along the way, I was also practicing a kind of emotional repression.

That ended the day I went to see The Odyssey.

That day, I broke.

I left the theater holding back the sadness. When I finally got home, a knot inside my chest came undone and I simply fell apart.

I felt like a fragile vessel.

I cannot remember the last time I had been that broken. I am not even sure I had ever felt exactly that way before.

The next morning, I felt different.

Lighter.

As if that knot had carried the weight of an anvil, an anchor buried in my heart, and someone had finally cut the chain.

Today, I am writing poetry again.

I am writing about feelings again.

Because even if I do not have everything I want, writing about gratitude these past few days on @GratefulSpace reminded me of how much I have to be thankful for.

It reminded me of how rich I already am, despite everything that has happened.

I do not know where these feelings belong.

I do not know if they will be useful to anyone.

But I do know this:

Writing about what is inside me helps.

Putting my feelings into words is teaching me something about courage.

Because a writer does not only write about what feels good.

He also writes about what makes him uncomfortable.

He writes when the pain is real.

He writes with a broken heart.

My duty to myself is to be honest about what lives inside me.

And perhaps, in doing so, give someone else a little hope to keep going.

Because defeat begins when we stop trying. And that, dear reader, is simply not in the budget.

We keep going.

Writing is an art.

It is a passion.

And sometimes, it is also a way of saving ourselves, just a little, from ourselves.