Writing isn’t just for an audience or publication. It isn’t just so you can wear a tweed jacket with thick glasses and “prove something” to the critical voice in your head–which by the way, never came from you, but is a combination of the least supportive (and most expensive) writing instructor you’ve ever had and the family members who keep asking how much you’re making on that skill.
Writing isn’t about any of that. For one, becoming a “skilled” writer (whatever the fuck that means) is generally a financial waste, which is why you keep being bothered by your family members about it. Secondly, that unsupportive writing instructor actually has no investment in your growth and spiritual development as a writer.
The question you need to answer is what brought you to the page in the first place? What agony needs to be given shape? What clogged scream needs to storm the barricades?
Writing is, primarily, a private act. It is between your brain stem and your frontal lobe. You cannot go backwards, logic to feeling, which means you cannot start with criticism. You must always start from within and go outwards. From the writer you were before you showed your writing to anyone.
Criticism does not belong at our centers. Nor does anyone else. Which is what brings me to the title of this piece–the letter that you never send.
As an empath, I consciously screen every word I speak through the ears of my audience. Whatever I get across needs to 1) avoid their triggers, 2) validate them, and 3) empower them. I endeavor far more messages that will be read by another, than will only be read by me, and exist solely for my learning.
The “Letter That You Never Send” is a letter that you pretend they will understand; not one they actually will. When a 6-year relationship ended 3 years ago, I began letter after letter after letter, but kept stopping myself because I knew he wouldn’t get it. I was allowing the outer world to influence the inner world. Each time I stopped myself was with the same stifled disappointment I felt in our conversations–stonewalling myself and editing myself, because I knew I was speaking to an earless void. In my stem, I didn’t know who I was writing that letter for.
It’s about you, honeybun. Writing is always about you. You have to start from the inside out. That’s the whole goddamn process. Those who criticize this writer or that writer for being “self-indulgent” have a funny idea of what writing is truly about.
The word “aubade” comes to mind here (allow me to flex my tweed jacket and thick glasses for a moment). It is a 17th century poem (SNORE) written about the separation of love at dawn–originally, to a sleeping woman (perhaps she fell asleep during a lecture about 17th century poetry).
What I’m saying is, we’ve always been doing this. If the poem is written to a sleeping woman, who is this song really for?
Wherever the energy between you and your loved one diverged, garden the space with your words. Not for them, but because you deserve flowers in the empty space.
