Writing is hard.
It’s not a lack of topics that stops me. As I go through my twitter feed, or the news of the day, I have a thousand things to say about it all. I get lost in my head, going about my day, composing responses to people’s ideas. Sometimes I am composing arguments, and sometimes I am just processing my feelings. And my own life isn’t boring. There is certainly enough material on any given day to write about parenting and wifeing and schools and mistakes and redemption and craziness.And I see the hand of God and glimpse mind blowing mysteries of the universe studying about Him. There are things to write about.
But the older I get, the more complicated writing about any of it gets.
My own stories are hard to write about, because they are never just mine. I see life through relationships, and so a story is never just my story to tell. Sometimes other people don’t want to share everything the way I do, and who am I to share there life when they want it to be their own? My kids are getting older, and care what I say about them and our life together. And a lot of times what makes life interesting are the hard things, which tend to be the most personal. When I read other people’s stories, I am always worried about the reactions of the other people whose stories they include with their own.
As time goes on, I am realizing I am pretty private with my thoughts and emotions. To really write about a situation, I end up sharing things that the people involved may not have known I ever thought or felt. Sometimes, I don’t want people to know how hard things really are, or how hurt I really was. I don’t want to share the frustrations I worked so hard to hide. I am afraid to expose my vulnerabilities. And the answer seems so much more complicated than just being brave and saying it all. So how do I write about my life?
Writing about current issues is hard for similar reasons. These topics are so emotionally charged. It seems like people don’t want to logically discuss anything, and everyone is hurt when you disagree with them. Sometimes the hurt is couched in anger, but that isn’t any better. I don’t want to bother hurting people over things that aren’t really that important to me. And that seems to be inevitably what happens when you take a stand and have an opinion. So I have a lot of things to say about almost everything, and end up saying almost nothing.
Writing about spiritual things is hard for another reason. Spiritual learning is a process. I understand and see things about God now that I could not have understood before. It is difficult to share insights that can only come built on many other insights and life experiences. And some spiritual experiences and knowledge seem to defy language. My convictions are strong enough I am not afraid of disagreement, but my feelings are sacred enough to me, that I wouldn’t want them to be a topic to argue, either. I want to share, and have people read just to understand me. But that has often not been the case.
Writing is just hard.
But the things that make it hard are also what make it wonderful. Writing allows me to process all the thoughts and feelings I suppress and never speak. I have to understand an idea well enough to be able to put it into words that make sense to someone else. I have to work through my thoughts and ideas instead of just letting them die, half-formed in the back of my head. When I really process what I think, I am empowered to choose and act instead of just react.
Writing allows me to be seen and known and in ways that hard for me to do any other way. Which is terrifying and liberating. We all want to be seen and understood. And then loved once we are really known. While I am not sure how to do this all the time in real life, I can write down my heart and share it that way. I recently wrote about my struggle with anxiety and a panic attack, and a spiritual experience that followed. I can share myself and my pain and hopes through writing about experiences in ways I never could in a conversation. And I think there is value there.
And while writing about spiritual experiences is difficult, it often ends up deepening the experience. Partly from the process of thinking through the experience and trying to understand it and explain it, and partly from how writing it down solidifies the experience as part of your life and helps you to rememeber it. The work makes it more a part of who you are, and will be from now on, when otherwise it would be easy to forget and remain unchanged. And I believe God wants us to share and to help each other find him.
So I guess I will keep writing, anyway. But, man, it’s hard. And wonderful.
