we are simply to write
Max tells us to sit and ask ourselves,
“What is present for me right now?”
Sit. Ask. Think.
And write.
Just write.
Answer the question and write.
About what?
There’s no clear instruction.
We are simply to write.
Let what comes guide us, and I think,
“Well, shit, I guess this is being present.”
It’s not a state I’m often in.
Every day, I’m present in my meditation.
My three-minute and forty-six-second guided voice memo.
Not my voice.
A mentor’s, a coach’s, a friend’s.
Why not mine?
Do I not trust it?
Lately, not as much as I used to.
All I hear is what I see on social media.
Buy this to be successful,
Do this to be happy.
You’re enough, but you’ll never be enough.
Comparison
Contradiction
Competition
My voice lost in the vastness of the ether.
Isn’t that why I signed up for this class?
To understand the power of words in the modern-day digital world?
Terrified I’ve lost my voice forever.
But I hear her,
Faintly.
A whisper concealed by that question,
“What is present for me right now?”
Write.
Just write.
Inside the words, I’ll find her again.
Clasp her hand and pull her back onto her feet.
What a reunion it shall be,
My voice and me.
Ah, that rhymed.
Yay me!
“What is present for me right now?”
Joy.
The thrill of this moment.
The reawakening of my voice.
Let’s fucking go.
Join the community today ↓ to get blogs, news, and announcements delivered right to your inbox!I started this poem on April 15, 2023, and finished it on July 21, 2024. It was an exercise in a Domestika class I took called “Creative Writing: The Power of Words in the Modern World” by Max Stossel. It’s by far one of my favorite writing courses, and I return to it every now and then.
Looking back at this poem, I’m baffled. The connections are there for me to see, the Universe declaring what has since become something dear to me.
The desire to find my voice again and doing so through this platform. Logging off of Instagram (four months strong so far), and changing the name of my Substack to “Simply Writing.” Right there, in the title all along, the truth.
This is why writing is powerful. We write things that our unconscious mind isn’t aware of at the moment. We only know that it sounds right. It needs to come out, and we let it, not sure what it will become. But then we return weeks, months, sometimes years later and find the connections.
I hope you find inspiration in this poem to simply write and not worry about what it will become. Sometimes letting the words pour out without context or structure offers us the most cathartic of pieces.
If this post resonated with you in any way, please consider buying me a coffee. A little caffeine goes a long way for a writer, and I will be forever grateful for the fuel. ☕️