It’s only words, and words are all I have …

I’ve been struggling these past several weeks about this blog site and what exactly it is supposed to represent and what it should represent.  It’s like trying to define and place inside a tidy little box all that is you, your personality, your likes and dislikes, and everything you want to express at any given moment.  Impossible for me – I am undefinable, and I don’t like to be restricted in anything.

I have been told my writings in recent months have been “dark.”  This, on the surface may seem harmless as a statement, but I took it to heart, thinking I didn’t want to depress everyone or anyone who happened to read my blog (a previous one).  Therefore I told myself to try and cut down, tone down, erase altogether, all the writings that were indeed dark or had a dark shade of gray.  I found that, by doing so, I didn’t want to write anything at all, that something inside me wasn’t allowed to express itself, and it turned inward and became my own depression.

Then, the other day, I happened to watch a movie, Anonymous, an alternate story about Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, and a nobleman who wrote the works under Shakespeare’s name.  It was a rather dark, thought-provoking, and awesomely shocking version of a piece of history.  Writing was this nobleman’s life, his passion, the core of his existence, and yet he had to hide it because it was considered beneath his station to be a writer.

Never having considered myself a real writer, I nevertheless had an epiphany:  I had let someone else’s opinion of my writings stop me from doing something that was a part of me, of something that was essential to existence, an outlet for creativity I have struggled to maintain my entire life.  I realized that when someone is disturbed by what they read (journalist articles excluded) it reflects on that person’s perception and his own way of dealing with the topic written.  I no longer want be judged for what I write.  I will write whatever, however, and whenever I feel a need to – or maybe not write anything at all because I don’t want to, not because I am afraid to for fear of people’s opinions of me as a person.

It is the death of creativity to fear others’ opinions of your work.