Writing

There Is Nothing Left To Say

But you should say it anyway

Caitlin McColl
Dose Of Wonder
Published in
5 min readJan 6, 2022

--

Photo by Danica Tanjutco on Unsplash

(If you aren’t a Medium member and want to read this article in full for free, click this sentence! If you are a Medium member — thank you for your support!)

No man is an island — wait, that’s no good. How is the ghost of John Donne haunting me from my Grade 12 English Literature class?

How do I love thee? Let me count — scratch that; that’s not me either.

Once upon a midnight dreary — crap, that’s that damn Raven! Poe, get out of my head!

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood — dammit, no, that’s Frost.

I wandered lonely as a cloud — hmmm, that sounds familiar too. Wordsworth, I think.

I met a traveler from an antique land — Shelley, what are you doing in my brain? Now I’m not going to be able to get that image of those two stone legs in the sand out of my mind.

Because I could not stop for death — There! That sounds good; let me just Goog — ugh. Why, Emily Dickinson, why?!

Why are all the good words taken? Years, decades, centuries of thought, of pen to paper, that’s why. There really is nothing new under the sun, as they say. There’s just slightly different ways of saying the same old things.

--

--

Caitlin McColl
Dose Of Wonder

Writer on mental health, grief & loss, mindfulness, running, life musings (+ fiction and poetry!). ❤️coffee & dogs. Vancouver 🇨🇦