Garbage and Galaxies

“98% of what I write is absolute garbage.”

I found myself saying this at dinner the other night with my neighbors, and immediately I began to ask myself if that was actually true. It’s not, really. But I am obsessed with 100% of it, the good and the bad and the in-between.

It got me thinking about why I’m so taken with this thing called writing, and what this deep fascination is asking of me.

I’ve been doing this practice for exactly one year, usually in the form of Morning Pages. Sometimes I show up in the middle of the night, raw and uncontained. Sometimes during a writing fit, there are times I feel that the entirety of the universe is moving out from inside me. And other times, during the dreaded writer’s block, I feel so inadequate at the blankness of the page and inspiration is an elusive commodity that I desperately want but cannot have.

I have almost forced myself to be dedicated to this practice because that’s what all the writers say to do. They say that the only requirement is showing up and confronting the page every day. Most days, I feel like just showing up is enough; I show up for myself, and have embraced writing as a liberation practice. And other days I want to dive into the impossible depths of myself and let the fullness of all that I am spill out on the page - but then I start thinking about what other people will think when they read it.

I have been activated by writers like Glennon Doyle and adrienne maree brown who are inspired by their own experiences and are courageous enough to share them with the world. The gremlins in my brain tell me I am a lifetime away from that kind of courage – but then I go back and read the thing I’ve written and I’m utterly shocked that these expressions came through me, and have a strong urge to share them with others. 

I want to do that - not only to write my own inspiration, but to share the inspiration that I have written with the world. I want to use my writing to tell stories only I can tell, with lessons and truths that are universal, with the main lesson being:

Life is full of beginnings and endings. Everything that starts will eventually stop or transform, and we spend most of our lives in the liminal space, the in-between, which sometimes feels like joy and other times feels like despair, but none of it lasts forever.

Even now, the gremlins in my brain are whispering – they are shady little demons. My coaching program calls these limiting beliefs. Up until recently, I was convinced I didn’t have any.

Then they showed up.

At the moment, they are conspiring to tell me all the reasons not to publish my writing: “What makes you a writer?”, I can hear them say. I’m pretty sure they spoke for me at dinner the other night when I said that 98% of what I write is garbage (it's probably more like 74%).

Despite that, I keep showing up. I keep getting the urge to fill, spill, and share. The obsession grows and grows.

It’s asking me to let it out. It doesn’t want to be contained.

Webb’s First Deep Field

The first images from the Webb Telescope were released earlier this month. The above image is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground – and reveals thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of vast universe.

Galaxies in a grain of sand. If that’s possible, then how many galaxies are in these fingers, in the neurons that are firing and conspiring so that I can breathe and blink and type at the same time?

What makes me a writer? What drives my obsession? It is the possibility that the infiniteness of the universe lives in me too, and the desire to explore it and share what I find with the world. What makes me a writer is the fact that I write with the intention of permitting my entire self to emerge with each pen stroke or key stroke.

So, I write - the garbage and the galaxies are begging to be released. Who else is going to let it out?