Writing has taken it out of me lately.
Or maybe it isn’t the writing exactly. Maybe it’s the remembering. The facing things. The pulling something out of the places where I tucked it away and looking at it long enough to find the words.
Whatever it is, I’m tired.
And sad.
Well, really, my emotions have been all over the place.
It has made me think more about why I’m even doing this. Why I’m writing these things and, more than that, why I’m putting them out into the world where other people can see them.
There is a vulnerability in that I don’t think I completely understood when I started.
Maybe that vulnerability is adding to the intensity of everything I’ve been feeling. Maybe I would be feeling all of these things just as strongly if I were writing them privately in a journal and closing the cover when I was done.
I don’t know.
But lately I’ve been thinking a lot about one question:
What do I want?
What do I want from putting my writing into the world?
What do I want from life?
And I think the answers to those two questions are tied together more than I realized.
I want what I think most of us want.
I want to be loved.
I want to be valued.
I want to be seen.
And maybe more than anything, I want to know that I matter.
Or mattered.
There’s something about that past tense that catches in me.
To know that my being here made some kind of difference to someone. That my life touched another life. That perhaps something was a little softer, or less lonely, because I existed.
Maybe that’s what I want from the writing, too.
I hope these words find someone who is walking through something I recognize.
Someone grieving.
Someone starting over.
Someone questioning what they believed about themselves, about love, about God, about the life they thought they were going to have.
Someone sitting inside one of those universal kinds of pain that somehow still manages to make us feel completely alone.
I hope, somehow, my words reach into that place and say:
You aren’t the only one.
Not because I have answers.
God knows I don’t.
But maybe there is something meaningful about one person standing somewhere in the dark and letting another person know, I’ve been here too.
I want to make a difference.
Maybe that sounds bigger than I mean it to.
I don’t need thousands of people to read something I wrote. I don’t need to know exactly where the words went or what became of them.
I think I just want to leave a little light somewhere.
A small light for someone adrift in their own storm.
And the strange thing about putting words into the world is that I may never know.
I may never know if someone found them at exactly the moment they needed them.
I may never know if something I wrote made someone feel understood, or helped them breathe a little easier, or simply kept them company for five minutes on a hard night.
But I hope it does.
This week I created a song about that exact feeling.
I called it Lantern for a Stranger.
And maybe that’s what all of this is.
The writing.
The songs.
The remembering, even when remembering takes something out of me.
Maybe I’m just trying to keep lighting little lanterns and setting them out into the dark.
Not knowing who will find them.
Not knowing if anyone will.
Just hoping that somewhere, someone who needs one does.
And maybe that is one way we remind each other:
You are here.
You are not alone.
You matter.
May we all find something that shows us we do.
If you’d like to hear the song that grew from this same hope, you can listen to Lantern for a Stranger here.