It’s not easy, writing through tears. Harder still when you can hardly sleep, when despair strikes head-on at each fitful waking, and you wonder (selfishly, you chide yourself) whether the effort you’ve poured into your passion, your work, is an utter waste.
The whole idea of relying on something so flimsy as words in an attempt to craft meaning from human experience seems, at such times, remarkably suspect.
But you are a writer. When your tears are spent (and after you’ve actually slept a little), you’ll return to those flimsy words, if only because, alongside love and hope and compassion, they’re all you’ve got. You’ll return to them because even in a world run amuck, words matter.
You are a writer, and you understand that sometimes illusions are perceived as truth, and that—maybe, perhaps—when probing those dark, uncomfortable margins of experience, yours and ours, the light you shine will illuminate something bigger.
You are a writer, and you bear witness to the hope contained in the smallest of things, to the extraordinary concealed within the ordinary.
You are a writer, and you will fiercely, courageously defend your right, and the right of every person, to express the thoughts and feelings that define them, even when those thoughts and feelings are clumsy and hurtful. Yours are the words over which you have control, and you will use them for good.
You are a writer, and you will not be silenced.