The "I" That Matters

I remember reading somewhere that writers are for whom writing is much more difficult compared to other people. 


I'm not a writer yet, though that has always been my lifetime dream. For now, I would have to satisfied with the title of a 'writer wanna be'. But I understand what it means to have this constant restlessness, to have this too many thoughts and emotions within you, to feel the urge to release them but somehow, the idea of materializing them in the form of rows of letters and words, scares you. I know how it feels to be trying to ignore the voices within you, calling and nagging, asking to be indulged. You long for the voices, you need to embrace them, yet you remain there at the other side of the river, refusing to follow the stream, afraid of being carried away, no matter how tempting the water is. 


I know how it feels to have this understanding deep down that you need to do something. Yet you're just too afraid. To worry. Too uncertain.


I have been constantly in such state of emotion for the past ten years.


I blame everything in my life now. I cannot indulge the calling, because right now I'm living the kind of life that would not allow me to do things other than the things that 'has to be done'. I cannot indulge the calling because once I do, I'd be carried away and get off the track of the life I'm living now. And going back is never easy. It is never easy to let go of the things you'd put your whole life and heart into. It's easier to pretend as if they don't exist. 


That has always been my excuses for not writing.


The life I'm living now is not the right environment for me to write. It fails to inspire me. I takes too much of my time and energy. Everyday it gets me drained right to my bones, until I have nothing more to write. I might still have many things to write, stuffing my chest and creates unbearable suffocating feeling, but I just can't write. Somewhere deep inside my heart, there's this small part of me questioning, does it really matter? Does it really matter whether I write or not? Does it really matter since there's always something more important to do? 


I blame them for preventing me to be what I always want to be: a writer. I blame the fast-paced environment of my current job for failing to provide the right kind of environment I need to be able to come up with something to write, for always keeping me away from silence and serenity, for constantly and persistently giving me chaos I don't need. I blame the life I'm living now for keeping my feet planted deep into the earth, unable to move, stuck with the kind of people (I think) I don't need, in order to help me write.


Until I read this book,The Sound of Paper, written by Julia Cameron. It's a book about personal struggles all artists experience, about the soul works artists must undertake to find inspiration.


I haven't read the whole book, but the excerpt I found on the back cover struck me.


"We must, as the elders advise us, bloom where we are planted. If we later decide that we must be transplanted, that our roots are not in soil rich enough for our spirits, at least we have tried. We have kept hold of the essential thread of our consciousness, the "I" that gives us the eye to behold."


It suddenly came down on me that none of the things I've been complaining about all this time deserve the blame for my persistently ignoring the voices within me.


I realized now that I should learn to see things differently. 


The fast-paced environment I'm currently working in could have been my source of inspiration all this time. They could have been the constant reminder reminding me how precious silence is. 


The people I think I don't need, they might have been the people I need the most in order to keep writing. They could have been showing me the reasons why we need solitude from time to time, why we need to appreciate our aloneness, to be able to dig deeper within ourselves.


All the chaos I don't need might have been there to keep my restlessness alive, so that I will not stop struggling, and questioning. So that I can keep this little flame alive and prevent myself from dying. So that I'm arrive at the comprehension I'm having now, that to dig deep into one's soul, one needs the chaos as much as one needs silence and serenity. That whatever world you live in, you just have to learn to bloom and rise to your maximum potentials, and that you actually CAN do that, because it's a matter of the "I" that is in you. It's all about you, what's in you, and what you are going to make of it. 


I think it's a form of true appreciation of one's self. It's the appreciation given by the owner of the self, the very self that has the highest authority to appreciate before other people do. The self that matters the most.