The other day, I woke up and the sky looked like autumn. The way the sun slanted across the grass was no longer summer—too enhanced, too bronzed, too much like chilly leaf-strewn walks in the park.
Of course, this is partly due to the slow change of one season into another, and partly due to the haze of smoke in the air from yet another fire close enough to grit your teeth.
Every year seems to go quicker, like a sand dial with too wide an opening between the top and bottom. I turn around, and it’s the end of September, when surely we just celebrated the 4th of July. Maybe it’s because there is still so much I hoped to have gotten done by now. A venue for my wedding ceremony locked in, a dress fitted and stored away, vows written, cake recipes tested…
There is still time. Not nearly as much as I had even a day ago, it feels. Each passing night brings a fresh jolt of the need to rush rush rush before those final grains of sand slip down the glass.
There is so much more to consider in this chapter of my life than I had ever paused to wonder about before, so many little details that seem to jump out at me when I least expect them. Premarital counseling, juggling international family members, logistics that fall together and fall apart within the same week, money slipping through fingers like water, watching ideas wash down the drain and then come coughing back to shore, resurrected.
And amid it all, the uncertainty of shifting career goals and figuring out what the heck I even like to do anymore.
I have been a word peddler for a long time now. Selling words, selling ideas, selling the very fibers of my nature, splatted out across various projects and pieces of content.
It can feel taxing sometimes, to sell words and have an empty well when reaching for some to use for myself. Even more so when the words sold are not treated kindly. That ugly voice in the back of my mind leaps out, bitter—it says to stop selling them to people who don’t appreciate them. It says to take them away and keep them for myself. To pull them close in a mothers embrace and promise never to let anyone hurt them again.
But that is not the way of the professional writer. That is the way of the novice. That is the way of someone who does not know what it is to actually be a writer in the real world.
Because to be a writer is to let go. To let go so many times you wonder if you’ll ever get anything back, or ever get to keep anything for yourself. To have the strength to swallow the lump of ego, or love, or self-defense, and try again.
All you have to do to know this is true is glance at bylines and read through the acknowledgments on any book off the shelf. It takes multiple eyes and perspectives to bring written works to life, of any kind.
There is a place for private words. The ones who are not asking for critique because they will only ever be read by one pair of eyes, one heart, one point of view.
But any word-spinners who have aspirations to sell words must come to the resignation that after they leave those private places, they are not yours anymore. At least, they are not only yours anymore.
That goes for anything from a beloved manuscript to a one-off article.
Dear word-peddlers, try to let go. The more you hold on, the more it will hurt when people inevitably have different views of your words than you do.
Of course, the next important thing is to learn when to stand up for your words, rest a protective hand on their shoulder, and say, “No, this is best.”
That is the double-sided coin of confidence in writing. The courage to let go, and the courage to advocate, knowing that either way the scale tips, you are whole and capable to face what comes.
Thank you for reading, and happy autumn!