Recently I was with a friend of mine who’s in a creative field and quite successful at what he does. He also writes on the side. He’s a good writer, a natural storyteller and stylist.

But so far he’s struggled to find the commitment, and thereby the time, to write. Life is full of a lot of other important, useful, and fulfilling occupations and tasks.

I felt his pain. I know he’ll get there – he’s too talented and driven – but as of now he’s still dealing with being, as I put it to him with a lot of identification and compassion, ‘a writer who’s not writing’.

I spent long stretches of my adult life wanting to write, and not being able to sustain a commitment to doing it. I was a professional musician. I was lucky enough to make a living playing music. But even though I was creating, I wasn’t writing… which is what was really in me to do. That’s what I yearned for.

It’s only in the last 15 years that I’ve become steadily productive as a writer. It’s a commitment now, a practice, a way… But those previous years were hard for me. I didn’t know how much it hurt until the pain started to subside.

I don’t mean to be too dramatic – all this pain – but for me it was true. Inside me I was a writer… and I didn’t know how to accept that and do something about it (which is the only antidote to the ache).

Back then I wrote in fits and starts; I spent much more time not writing than I did writing.

I was too scared. Scared that I wasn’t or wouldn’t be good, scared that people wouldn’t like what I wrote, scared that it would all come to nothing… literally, petrified.

It’s not that I don’t have those fears anymore (though it’s true I don’t care about them as much), it’s that the activity of writing on a regular basis is satisfying enough to me, and what stems from it is by now real enough, that my fears are secondary. They’re not enough to stop me from writing.

Sometimes fear stops me from doing certain things with my writing – like promoting it more aggressively, for example – but these days it rarely stops me from the writing itself.

For me that’s a big deal. Because now I accept that it’s in me to write. If I don’t write, I’m not OK. The desire to write, the feeling that I have something to say, to contribute, has always been inside me; it just took me a long time to own it and act on it.

So now, whatever my level of success or acceptance… as the song says, They Can’t Take That Away From Me. That being the experience of a commitment to writing.

To be right with myself, to be myself, for a long time I didn’t know how important it was for me to write.

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