A letter to my own writing vulnerability
The first voice I lost was my own. I’m still writing her back to life.
People read my Substack posts and say, in a roundabout way: “Dahlia… you sound different.” And me, ever the dramatist, I take off my glasses, squint at the message, then put them right back on so I can reply.
I type a few words, pause, and type the rest:
I sound different because I am different.
I underwent a bit of a change this year. I’ve had congestive heart failure (everything is back to normal) and a double hip replacement, as well as lost a ton of weight. I’ve suffered the loss of my father and my grandmother, my two favorite people, two years apart, 2013 and 2015.
Those wounds still sting. My writing froze and thawed, froze and thawed. I kept it light, kept it romancey, because I didn’t think anyone wanted the real weight of what I carried.
We get taught early which parts of ourselves are “too much.” You’re too angry. You cry too much. You’re too needy. You’re too loud, dial it back, for heaven’s sake.
And being from Gen X, I tended to sand the edges down until what’s left feels safe enough to show in public and in my writing. However, and lean in darling, because I’m about to blind you with science here, safe is not the same as true. And truth – that messy, whispered confession at 3 am truth, is what people want to hear.
That voice that sticks in the back of your throat, or to the point of your pen, or what you backspace over in your document is the voice that people are starving to hear. It’s not fluff, not fun, not romancey. Nope, it ain’t none of that.
It’s real. The real you, writing real characters with real stories. Sometimes these stories (and maybe the characters too) bleed.
Writing the scary stuff
The work that lingers isn’t the polished performance. It’s that cracked-open confession. The shaky sentence you almost deleted. The paragraph you felt in your ribcage as you typed. Yep, the one you stared at, fingers hovering over the backspace button. The one you read later and say, jokingly, “who wrote that?”
It’s when you have the cojones to name what’s real: grief that makes your chest cave in, fury that turns your face to fire and makes your eyes spark, dewy-eyed tenderness that makes you whisper a name into your pillow before you close your eyes at night.
Claim it. Name it. Write it before it floats away on the next thought, or even worse, settles to the earth in stony silence, never to be heard from again.
Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s a match to a stack of dry kindling. It blazes into the corners of the heart and mind that often remain hidden.
So I ask you dear readers and writers…..
What are you still afraid to say?
- What would you write if no one could judge you?
- What truth do you circle but never touch?
- What story do you ache to tell?
If the thought or story idea makes your pulse quicken and your breath come faster, then you’ve got a story to write. If you’re thinking about this story while you brush your teeth, or at odd moments of the day, it’s the story you need to write.
Feel the fear, and say it anyway.
Nobody’s telling you to bare your whole entire soul to the world. Hall and Oates tells us, “Some things are better left unsaid”, and that’s a whole truth.
But. But. BUT. Listen, Linda.
You need to practice telling YOURSELF the truth. Put it on paper. Then, if you’ve a mind to…hide it. Heck, burn it. Getting that first truth out makes the others easier to tell. And maybe the next time, you’ll show someone.
Think about it: your raw, no-holds-barred voice may be the very thing someone else needs to hear.
One more thing. Just like Columbo.
I recently came upon an artist name Iluka. She’s blonde, young, from Australia, whereas I am none of those things.
But she gave me a bit of truth. A truth that I keep tucked in my purse amongst the quarters I use for my cart at Aldi.
And it’s from her song “Crucify Me”:
“I stitched up my silence with ribbons and rage.”
Silence can be a shield. But it can also be a jail cell.
And an angry woman is a dangerous one. Get out there and be dangerous.
Writing from the Parlor,
Dahlia
