The Price of Ownership

I write to remember. I write to grow roots where I’m planted. I write to grow wings and soar above all that I know. Since I learned to form letters, the page has always been my best friend. I could trust it with my secrets and my fears, with my dreams and disappointments. It was my only safe place, the one place I could take chances without risk of ridicule. On the page there were no rules. There was nothing I could’t do.

   I’ve never lost my love of language but I think I have been a bit of a Peter Pan about writing and the page has been my Neverland. The child in me has hoarded the gift of writing. I’ve been unwilling to share and like all captured things, words become hollow when they are hidden away and not allowed to grow and change in the minds of others. As I’ve grown older, the gift freely given by what I can only call a Higher Power, has become a burden. 

   The page was a safe place, because it welcomed me, comforted me, encouraged me. It freed me from the dark, twisted tangle of a forest that my home had become. My hidden journals were the only things I felt were mine and so I felt I had to protect them. Whatever I wrote was now tinged by fear, a fear of loss. As time progressed, a child’s loneliness became an adult’s resentment. My fear had made me selfish. It had turned a gift into a possession. I no longer approached that clean white space as a magic place where anything could happen. Anticipation turned into procrastination. I’d lost the need to call out who I was. 

   Writing has become a serious business. No longer do I quickly abandon what doesn’t work in the spontaneity of the moment. What doesn’t work is now a failure followed by retreats into shame and self-doubt. The price of ownership has taken a heavy toll.