To write, perchance to dream…

I miss the words.  I’ve given myself countless excuses, countless teeny tiny oh-so-relevant reasons to stall, to hide, to stop myself.  No one wants to read my words… I’m not good enough to matter… my ideas are trite… whatever.  It’s so easy to stop.  It’s so easy to decide it’s not worth it.

But then I remember how much it hurts to stop writing.  The words pile up in my head… phrases and ideas run around in there until one of them escapes and runs down my arm, eventually shooting through my fingers onto the page.  Or the screen.  Or the back of a receipt.  If I don’t give the words a way out, they just keep running around in there, in my head, and the pressure builds.  They get jumbled and tumbled together until I can’t separate them from each other or from everything else going on in the world.

When that happens, it gets harder to pull them apart, to give them a chance to live.

I hadn’t written anything in ages – so long that re-reading my drafts surprised me.  And then I remembered, the only way to stop the jumble in my head is to let it out.  It was only a couple of thousand words – just a few pages really – but I remembered.  I remembered why I can’t stop writing.  I don’t do it to please anyone.  I don’t do it to make an impression on the world.  I don’t do it to get published – though that wouldn’t suck.

I do it… because I am compelled.