I love this so much because this is a struggle that nearly every writer goes through but is yet another topic that is a taboo.
Society doesn’t really see writers as human beings, just “unbiased” robots who have to deliver them information that fits their narrative. We see this a lot with journalists, who are constantly maligned for simply doing their job (and I don’t mean the ones on TV).
As humans, we don’t really like to listen to others and we’re always trying to look for something to say, to counter the noise we’ve just heard.
And to think about it, all writing is noise — a type of noise than can defy the commands of society and challenge the world. Everyday, we just work on getting louder. That’s the beauty of it.
Speaking of beauty, it’s time we all stop worrying about the other end. You wrote what you did in those journals as a teen because you saw beauty and value in what you had to say. Sure, what you said may have been atrocious, but you were audacious enough to write it on paper for it to be found and for it to be challenged by your older, wiser self.
Our writing will always be challenged, it’s inevitable and we can’t avoid it unless we just stop writing. It won’t just be challenged by people who oppose us in the comments; it also will be challenged by our future selves as we continue to write better content. It may seem like crap you will be ashamed of having written once, but it’s how we continue to grow.
And the approval of somebody else is absolutely unnecessary. We don’t write solely for our audience, for we’d have to cater to them with content that we wouldn’t enjoy producing and where’s the incentive to do that? More followers? We write for ourselves first and foremost because emotions are powerful — they demand to be felt. And that’s really all that matters. If we see beauty and value in what we write, so will someone else out there.
That’s why I try not to write to a group of people. I just picture one person in mind and write for them, for the two of us, to entertain ourselves with a raw story.
And since when did people gain the right to be protected from anything that goes against their narrative? The world is a complicated thing and it’s amazing for that reason. Anyone who fails to realize that and just blocks out all the “noise” is only proving how insignificant they really are — just another lapdog to the corporation that is this society we live in.
