What Really Matters

I've been struggling recently under the pressures I've placed on myself. I've set goals to post here more often, I've committed to doing NanoWrimo next month, and I have promised myself that I will not give up on the project I've been working on for the last year.

And underneath it all there is a part of me arguing that I don't really have anything to say, that no one really wants to read what I write.

I found several new blogs to follow today and while I was reading through them I came across a short post from last Friday on Confident Writing. Joanna Young quotes from Writing Down the Bones, a book that I read or started recently but don't remember much. But this quote really brought it home:

"Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical.

We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it.

At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all our winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.

This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. we were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.” ~ Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

Our seemingly insignificant and boring lives really do matter and it is through our writing that we discover exactly how much they matter. You do have something worth saying! You have something to write! Because you really matter. And so do I!