I’ve felt an increasing uneasiness surrounding my creative work lately. There’s this piece that I’ve been searching for since I left the greenhouse that my college classes provided. The constant writing. The steady stream of thought. The applauding of individual work. This fierce bravery that I haven’t been able to reach again.
A big contributing factor has been this enticing pull to see what everyone else is up to: what are they doing? how are they reacting? what are they saying, thinking, feeling, seeing? I hadn’t realized it until now, but I was too scared to lean in and truly get to know myself. What it is that I’ve been given to see?
Dani Shapiro wrote, “It is the job of the writer to say, look at that. To point. To shine a light. But it isn’t that which is already bright and beckoning that needs our attentions. We develop our sensitivity—to use John Berger’s phrase, our “ways of seeing”—in order to bear witness to what is. Our tender hopes and dreams, our joy, frailty, grief, longing, desire— every human being is a landscape.”
It seems like creating is mostly about trusting oneself enough to capture the world in the way we see it: through the lens of our past and our experiences and our mistakes and what we’ve learned. It’s about bearing witness to what is directly in front of us.
And it’s true, maybe what I see isn’t what you see, and maybe that’s okay. Because if we try to see through the eyes of everybody else we’ll never fully know what we were meant to bear witness to. We’ll miss the beauty and the way it shapes us; or that all our suffering was not in vain. It’s also true that being honest with what we see is often met by resentment and discomfort, but I’m realizing that it’s only until our words find their home. Where they were meant to land all this time. Maybe it’s someone else’s bruised heart. Maybe it’s our own selves, our own liberation— a bird out of its cage, at last.
(There are more of us, see. There are always more. People who have known the darkness that you too, have known. Those who understand the terrifying bravery of speaking up, of saying, “this is what I see and isn’t it odd? Isn’t it beautiful?”. That’s the thing, isn’t it? We need each other. We need each other to open the door, to let us know it’s okay… it’s better out here.)
All we can do is talk about the view from where we’re standing—