“I need to write about love. I need to think and think and write about love-otherwise, my soul won’t survive.” -Paulo Coelho
It was four years ago at the New Year that I began my Positivity Quest, which became this daily blog for three of those years. At the same time, I also started a daily meditation practice, regular exercise routines and a high school club. Writing it all down during those years taught me what I knew. Picking away at words, writing and scrapping sentences, reorganizing paragraphs until I fell asleep, fingers on the key board, was the Masters program of everything I was trying to learn in the positivity practice.
At the core, I would like to believe that I am a writer, but as the years went by and my writing deepened, I developed a phobia to the vulnerability and doubt about the depth of my self disclosure. My voice was constantly checked with the question – can I say that? I became increasingly aware of the consequences that other writers suffered at their own hand. Chronicling the demise in your relationships and exposing the flaws in intimacy may well be clarifying for readers, but is heart wrenching for the characters surrounding the writer. I know of more than one divorce as a result.
So I stopped writing because I couldn’t answer the question about what I could say – and not just about my intimate relationship, but also about my business. The sweeping changes that a small business endures in its development, the characters of the employees and the ways they shape what you do, who you are as a business, how you are perceived… what can you tell?
What comes first, the business woman or the writer? What stories I can share is really more a question of what I must keep silent. I suppose I could write for no one, but there is not much compelling in keeping a diary for me. It is an interaction, this writing for me and putting it out in the world; even if no one else ever reads it, putting it on the web makes it real for me. But it is also more real because of the risk, because of the transparency that happens in a life well told. So this is why I have to write, for whoever is out there to read it- so I know what transpired in my life and I take the time to turn what occurred into meaning I can articulate.
Thanks to Jenn Hirsch, my friend and accomplice in this renewed writing adventure who is an architect of social movements. I am blessed to have her helping me create a Love Agent movement and help me discern the essence of what makes change.
