I can not remember, nor am I aware of whether I have ever felt a need to be a writer with this same level of urgency that I feel now. Today. This minute.

Is this urgency enough to overcome my deep sadness spreading through my body like a sickness? Before I can pinpoint the seed of this sadness, my inner critic wastes no time, salivating at my intention it hisses at me ‘how could you be a writer? You can’t even respond to your emails and your blog is shit.’ I cringe. Well that was rude. And yet how may I interpret this criticism differently? Instead of a fact, could it be a clue to what is making me sad?

With cautious curiosity, I hold this critique in a space of no judgment. In this space I am permitted to think about how the critique could be connected to other events, thoughts, experiences and emotions in my past-present life. Only hours ago I learned that my first book proposal was rejected for reasons that I, an entity separate from the publisher, deemed unsatisfactory. If I am relying on the judgment of someone external to myself, aka: publisher, to apply metrics that I am not aware of to determine if my writing is worthy of publishing then, even if a proposal of mine is accepted, I have no way of knowing if what I wrote and was accepted meets metrics that I, not someone else, set. I then am no longer writing for myself but for someone else to accept me. My writing then becomes undifferentiated from other pursuits of praise that have left me depleted and lost. This critique also assumes that to be a writer, one must be published. Could I be an unpublished writer? Could a person who dedicates time to writing a collection of thoughts, well-researched ideas or stories that are not published not still call themselves a writer? To my critic I say, why the fuck not? I acknowledge that yes, I do have an inbox whose unread category is intensifying at this very moment. Butthis blog is definitely not shit as that is a physiological impossibility and even if it was, feces still have a use, a purpose. Therefore while this critique is a reminder of my unread emails, I have decided there is not enough substance in it to cease my efforts at being a writer. And so, in the spirit of curiosity, what could my critic possibly be trying to tell me? Or rather, be trying to get me to do through what it is telling me?

Well, if rejection is painful and pain is bad then rejection, the cause of pain must be avoided at all costs. Avoiding writing and avoiding submissions of my writing would avoid the possibility of rejection and therefore pain. It is with tenderness that I caress my critic with this new found understanding of its desire to protect me. I thank it for its intention and suggest an alternative where to cease to write is to (at least partially) live in silence and to live in silence hinders the possibility of connection and without connection, isolation is fostered and with isolation comes a dearth of community; another form of rejection. Therefore, if through writing or not writing I am faced with the possibility of rejection, I come to rest that rejection-pain is unavoidable. The question then becomes would I rather, with full knowledge that the possibility of overcoming silence does not erase rejection-pain, experience being rejected with or without the possibility of overcoming silence? For in the wisdom of Audre Lorde, while my silence will not protect me (from in this case rejection-pain), only the lack of silence, in this case writing, brings the opportunity for change.

I can not remember, nor am I aware of whether I have ever felt a need to be a writer with this same level of urgency that I feel now. Today. This minute. Unable to eradicate sadness, I interpret my urgency as a deep thirst to write away my silence; an act worthy of rejection-pain as it holds the possibility of connection to a community who, with access to my inner (written) self, may accept me as I am.