Hey you.
You who writes.

You who keeps on writing.

You who pours out your hurt and your joy and your bliss and your ways of being and existing and understanding onto page and screen.

You who hits the submit button again and again. Even though you’ve papered an entire wall in rejection letters, because you know that somewhere there is a home for your words and if you keep trying you will find it.

You who writes in private, in secret, in the darkest back corner of your closet after everyone else has gone to sleep just so you can write the whole of you.

You who writes to follow the trail, to chart the course, to make your own map through the mystery.

You who writes the path to your own redemption, because you know that clawing your way back to forgiveness of self is the only way through.

You who writes in silence, in a whisper, in invisible ink.

You who writes with the risk of being dismissed, dishonored, ignored because the risks of not writing are even greater.

You who writes because nobody else is willing to tell the truth and the truth must be told.

You who writes to bring the perpetrator to justice.

You who writes to fuel the revolution, to feed the fire, to create the necessary unrest.

You who writes to bring the people into the streets.

You who writes so that your children and their children and their children will know.

You who writes until you are bleeding and then uses the words to staunch the flow.

You who writes to lift others even when you are writing through the thick haze of your own tears.

You who writes to shine a harsh and uncompromising light on what is unjust, on the wrong doing, on the abuse occuring in the shadows.

You who writes to unbreak your own heart.

To you who writes to weave the magical stories that lull the babies to sleep at night.

You who writes to make visible the ones who do the hard and lonely and dangerous work and who risk it all just to stay alive.

You who writes in gratitude and thanks that you are able to bring worlds to life on paper.

You who writes to give voice to the things nobody else is willing to say.

You who writes so that the invisible can be seen, the marginalized brought to center, the spotlight moved away from the stars and onto the ones in the background who make the show go on.

You who writes to make a thing real, to recreate the past, to return to yourself, to mark in ink the path of a new beginnings. 

You who writes the body. The heat and salt and sex of it.  The truth of blood and vein and the secrets the bones hold. The soft and wet and want. The body that winds and dances in the shadows. The body that heals trauma by naming and claiming her own pleasure.

You who writes to claim space, to name yourself, to create a new world you can stand to live in.

You who writes to own your history or accept your present or shift your future.

You who keeps writing love letters to the one long gone or the one not yet arrived or to fall in love with the miracle of your own being.

You who writes to make peace with the ghosts, to release the steam, as a substitute for the therapy you cannot afford.

You who writes because the world inside you is so magical and so real and even if nobody else believes you it must exist somehow, represented in concrete form.

You who writes because to not write would be like a form of death, and you’ve died too many times already.

You who writes to bring us all back to life.

You who writes to set the record straight, to hold the story, to alter the dominant narrative.

You who writes to bring hope to the hopeless and give voice the the voiceless, to share the stories of the ones nobody bothers to hear.

You who writes in the face of all that would silence you.

You who writes to craft beauty in the midst of devastation.

You who writes because the force of creation is what gets you out of bed each day.

You who writes to brighten hearts and lift spirits and to make the sun rise in the sky.

You who writes like the ocean, like waves crashing and crashing and crashing again against the shore of what is real.

You who writes the dance, the movement of clouds across the sky, the way the flowers blow in the breeze.

You who writes outside of the lines. Who ignores the rules. Who has no idea about grammar or punctuation or the correct way to spell things, but who writes anyway.

You who writes in an illegible scrawl on purpose to keep the stories safe from eyes unable to see the the beauty of your truth.

You who writes words that rise like smoke and fall like ashes, still alive from the fire.

You who writes to take the swirl of chaos and confusion and, waving pen like magic wand, makes the spinning stop and the truth rise to the surface, clear and true, like a fortune teller conjuring the future from her crystal ball.

You who writes only the necessary, who casts multitudes from scarcity, who takes the story of the entire universe and reduces it to the exact few words that say everything that has ever needed to be said.

You who writes even though they told you that you could not. That should should not. Who writes over the red pen marks and bad grades from teachers who thought writing had to follow the textbook.

You who writes the things that push people up against their own limitations, their prejudice, their hard edged bias, who forces us to see the things we would rather ignore. You who are willing to endure the discomfort of pushback in order to help us all grow.

You who writes the edges and pushes the boundaries and then calls the words back into the center.

You who writes the trauma. Writes the pain. Writes the ugly words that we don’t want to read but can’t turn away from, not because you want to, necessarily, but because you know we all we need to stay present with what is real.

You who writes the worst of the hurricanes and tornadoes of reality and then keeps writing all the way into the eye of the storm where everything is peaceful and beautiful and true.

You who writes the imaginary, the fantasy, the fiction, and in the writing you conjure a world that is deeply real and alive. 

To writes who writes with irrepressible joy bubbling up through your cells, giddy with the knowledge that only you could write this particular story.

You who writes in service to the cause, to the greater good.

You who writes the birth, the death, the honest everyday mundanities of our humanity. The messy and the boring and the deeply human.

You who writes to honor who has come before, to uplift the wisdom of your ancestors and the truth of those who walked the lands long before we were here.

You who writes in the stolen moments, on the grocery store receipts, who scribbles poems on the inside curve of your elbow, inking skin with novels that wash away in the shower but that mark you forever.

You who writes to create a truth that is more true than reality that you are living. 

You who writes under a name not your own in order to write the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

You who writes to understand what you already know and to learn what you need to understand and embrace the unknowing of all that exists beyond comprehension.  

You who writes to remember the details your brain will not hold.

You who writes your way into your own wide open life.

You who writes. Period.

To heal the world. To right the wrongs.  To save a life. 

Because you couldn’t stop, even if you tried.

It is a brave and beautiful thing to create stories in the face of all that would stop you.

You do that. And it is everything.

The post For the ones who write appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

The stories burn for release.  We are writers by birth and by destiny and by intention. Not by choice. If we never scratched another word on a coffee shop napkin, this would not change.  A writer is not someone who does. A writer is someone who is. Denial will result in an unceasing ache and a relentless empty.  Our words are the truest way we serve the world.

Truth:   We will always have another mistress

Her name is Muse. We serve her with devotion. Do anything to please her and keep her close. Courting. Seduction. On our knees, desperate pleading. And when she leaves us, as she always will, we must write our way back into her graces. She responds only to action and dogged intention.

Truth:  We will stop at red lights

Pull over onto the dusty side of the freeway in the middle of nowhere. Gas station parking lots. School pick up lines. We will leave your arms at 3am after hard, hot sex. We will write with whatever is available and on any surface that presents itself. When the words come burning clear and true, we must answer.   Sometimes the words will be lost anyway. Gone into the ether as if they never were. We will mourn them like a lost child, convinced they were our most brilliant.

Truth: It is terrifying sometimes, having so many words living inside 

They beat snare drum steady in our chest. They burn and scratch and push and pull. They are thirsty for freedom. They crave the danger of the edge. They want someone to promise safety. They don’t give a single fuck. Sometimes we can subdue and tame and become master of this beast, but often we are at its mercy. The words are their own living, fire-breathing dragon. We must get out of the way, and give them space to work through us and birth themselves.

Truth: There are days when writing is survival

On these days the spilling of words on page is the only thing that will save us from the demons and from ourselves. The only path to burn down and rebirth. The only way out and through. The very thing that keeps us alive.

Truth: We need to write more than anything

It is the most relentlessly driving force. But many days we’ll do just about anything to avoid having to write. We will hide and run and resist with every last bit of strength we can muster. It’s the ultimate dichotomy of the creative soul.

Truth: We live nestled snugly inside paradox

We inhabit our contradictions. We are both walking peace and writhing confusion. Our only certiantly comes from the solidity of mystery. Creativity thrives on ultimate possibility and infinite potential. We couldn’t do it if we were any more sure of anything.

Truth: We’ve been writing since we were 8, or 11 or 15  

Or forever in lives long since past. We likely began with sappy, hopeful, angsty, rhyming odes to boys and girls and sunsets and ocean waves and bus stop daydreams. Mostly about love. These days we’re not so concerned about rhyming. But most of us are still awfully preoccupied with love.

Truth: You spill blood, we hemorrhage novels

Our cuts seep with the precise cadence of our lover’s sigh as our fingers slid from ribs to waist. They feel like a grieving mother hitting the ground, tearing her hair out with the wail of centuries of torn from her chest. They taste the way the ocean feels on bare skin, like salt and wet and cold and freedom. Sometimes we need to cut ourselves, clean slice across soft expanse of skin, force it all to rise to the surface – just to access the truth pulsing through our veins.

Truth: We live in metaphor as much as in reality

There are endless ways to draw our own blood. We know them all. We also know that the best way to staunch the bleeding is the exact same way we are both emptied and filled. To sit and spill our guts and our grief and our joy and our sex and our longing and our wanderlust and the time we finally found our way home. To write until we are spent. Until the words are done with us.

Truth: Don’t wait up

Rise yourself over the city at night and look. The lights still burning at 3am are those of night workers and insomniacs and the broken hearted.  And writers. Always, the writers. The witching hours between midnight and dawn belong to us. To the candles and whiskey and the sex and cigarettes and the ink and the click of the fingers against keys and the stacks and stacks and stacks of paper scrawled with layers of truth and bullshit and true love and glory and vice and battle. In the quiet time when the ghosts dance the real work gets done.

Truth: We have learned to speak in the spaces between words

In the infinite pause at the top of the incline, in the curve of the comma. In the expanse of the inhale. In the silent slide of lips along clavicle and the closing edge of teeth on hipbone. We know that one almost imperceptible moan can contain an entire love story. And that tears can be the personification of the erotic and that the metallic bite of copper is the exact taste of grief. And that in these soundless spaces we say more than could ever be conveyed with the smooth slide of pen across page and the words of a hundred languages at our disposal.

Truth: To be an artist is to be both archaeologist and surgeon

We dig deep, unearth all of the broken and discarded and fractured pieces. Pottery and garbage and bones and beauty. We dust them off and lay them out and step back to look. We study your history and make sense of your story and then splice you back together into letters and paragraphs and chapters. And on our pages you are more than the sum of your parts and yet exactly what you’ve always been meant to be. This will be disconcerting. And beautiful.

Truth: If you love us, even for a time, you won’t walk away unscathed

Loving a writer will fill you and buoy you and shatter you and save you again and again and again. You will become the muse and the one thing standing in her way. We will love like you’ve never been loved and tell stories you never wanted told. We will push past your boundaries and call you safely home. We will love you with wholeness and fullness and notes on scraps of torn musical scores and with the way we whisper your name in the darkest night. Even our touch will feel like a story. You will never be the same.

Truth: Lists like this are utter bullshit

We are infinitely variable, us writers. The beast and the scotch over ice and the muse and the love and the blood and the 3am incantation and homecoming and the paradox  – all of it – these are my words, and my naked heart projected on this screen. Nothing more than that. And if you are a writer you have your own pulsing, beating, brutal, brilliant heart. And your own muse and ritual and truth. And only you will know exactly how it loves and lives and breathes your art into life and builds your life into art.

And you will know that there is only one thing you ever really need.

To write.

Don’t let me stop you. Don’t pay the slightest attention to my ramblings. These are nothing but midnight meanderings fueled by a hard shot of whiskey and romanticized by a blood red candle flame and filled with the unceasing longing of my own ocean heart.

But you? All you need is a blank page and a good fucking pen. Light your candles and pour yourself a drink.  Séance your ghosts and seduce your muse. Dance only for yourself. Make it hot. Feel the truth of your bones leading the way.

And don’t let me try to tell you a single thing about your own truth. Or your life or your creativity or the ways and hows and whys of your loving or your life or your words. You know how it is for you. You’ve always known.

So quit the excuses. Sit down. Breathe deep. Own that burning drive inside you.

And write the fuck out of your life. 

The post 10 Truths Of The Writer’s Soul appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.