How to Map the Soul (One Word at a Time)
I have to be honest. While I set today as a deadline for my initial posting on the Medium platform and drafted several pages of several different ideas, I finally (18 minutes before my designated posting time) decided to save those drafts for another time, and start from scratch. Why? Because something has been on my mind all day, so much so that I can not in good conscience leave this particular itch unscratched.
Last week I watched a short segment of an interview with David Bowie from late in his career. He speaks about the creative nature of artists, stating fervently that artists generally produce their worst work when they create for the sake of meeting someone else’s expectations. Consequently, I’ve been pondering the various creative outlets about which I am passionate, and whether or not I am creating somewhat out of a desire to fulfill expectations. There’s nothing quite like a quaint slice of Bowie wisdom to make you question your entire creative process at 4 A.M.
Bowie’s point brings up something very frustrating about what the internet has done to the beauty of writing. Many writers I know work in a freelance capacity, often in social media marketing or content creation of some kind. From my experience, these writers are people who are passionate about the magic of our words and our ability to paint incredible pictures for one another by weaving them together in our own ways. These writers are not people just trying to pump out 1500 word essays about whichever product will earn them a paycheck. No, these people want to create meaningful works of art with their language, wherever possible; however, many of these folks are jaded, bordering on bitterness, because of how certain popularized Inbound Marketing strategies paired with contemporary pop culture have sucked a lot of the life out of writing, particularly on the internet.
Most of us remember Buzzfeed (do people still read Buzzfeed?) and its gratuitous lists upon lists of contrived, quirky little blurbs of relatively useless information. If only for the sake of satire, I felt slightly tempted to create a “7 Ways to Make Sure Your First Blog Post Doesn’t Suck” article, simply to demonstrate a surefire way of creating a shitty blog.
But I didn’t. Instead, I decided to table all of my fun and elaborate ideas in lieu of a simple, yet fundamental concept: that before I get into my life stories — my adoption, my numerous brushes with death, my run in with a SWAT team, my cross country escape from a sex trafficking ring, my terrifying and rewarding experiences as a drug dealer, how being homeless saved and changed my life, watching addiction kill my best friends, and my eventual arrival at an understanding (and lack of understanding) of the incredible Universe and how it ties everything and everyone together flawlessly in the present moment — that I want to set a precedent for my writing. It has to always be honest. I want my writing to speak my truth for me. I don’t simply mean that I want the events I am writing about to be depicted accurately, but that I want the way in which I write to be true to the human being that I am. I want it to be so true to who Michael is that it occasionally makes people uncomfortable, but uncomfortable in the good way that difficult honesty sometimes does. And it will be okay because I know that my favorite thing about writing, whether by hand or by typing on a keyboard, is when I feel the words leaving me and a part of my soul going with them, and I feel both connected to the world around me and freed by those words at the same time.
There truly is something freeing about writing from the heart and soul. It’s cathartic. It’s like telling someone a secret you’ve been holding in for years and years. It’s like finally crying after holding in tears. Sometimes, tears you didn’t even know you needed to cry. If sweating is how the skin organ is cleansed then writing is how the soul is cleansed.
As a reader, too, I can tell when an author is laying it all on the line. Often when I am reading a great story or poem, there is an emotional connection to the author’s narrative that I can almost feel physically, no matter what the subject matter. I am sure you know what I’m talking about. Have you ever read something that resonated with you so strongly that you felt it? That’s probably because that thing came from the soul, not from someone’s desperate, sweaty-palmed, Adderall induced last minute attempt at meeting a Buzzfeed article quota.
This radiant sensation is something I can honestly say I do not experience when reading even the most eloquently crafted click-bait hogwash that pervades our screens, oozing out of the margins of every online experience we have nowadays. Even so much of the online presence of “conscious culture” on every platform is consumer bait in the guise of beautifully worded spirituality.
Think about this: We carefully curate our social media presence with clever captions. We say thousands of words every day, using our body language and the tone of our voices in such a way that they enhance the meaning of our words. Yet very few of us take 5 minutes to sit down with ourselves and just write whatever comes to mind, straight from our consciousness. Not for anyone else, just for us, free of judgement. Free of expectation.
The occasional “To Do” or “Groceries” list does not count, as cute as your handwriting might be. For many of us, we grow up writing essay after boring essay to pass a class, or we ponder the familiar, outdated story of a girl’s diary, in which her brother discovers where it is hidden, reads the whole thing cover to cover, and subsequently uses the really juicy stuff to embarrass her for the rest of the life. What a d*ck! The juicy stuff is the stuff from her soul! That’s what makes it juicy. Most of us probably haven’t undergone this level of shame being associated with our writing. But still — these are, for a good majority of people, the extent of their personal experiences with introspective writing. Very few of us keep a consistent daily journal or gratitude list. Why? For the most part, I don’t think most of us have a very magical perception of writing. Sometimes thinking about writing feels more like an assignment than a source of enjoyment. It’s a dull, grade-getting necessity at best, and a dark-secret-revealing liability at worst.
So, all this taken into consideration, here is me finally getting to the point: giving you (straight from my heart and soul) words of encouragement to connect with yourself in the medium of the written word. Pick up a pen or pencil. Find a piece of paper. Sit down. Write! Don’t worry about spelling. You don’t have to follow grammar and syntax rules. You don’t have to ever show anything you write to anyone. Or you can show it to everyone! Just LET GO and let yourself flow onto the paper for a few minutes. Honestly, you deserve it. You may be amazed at the level of intimacy you develop with yourself. It’s like slowly discovering secret treasures you didn’t even know were waiting for you to uncover them, in ways that thoughts and spoken words simply could not accomplish. For me, a huge benefit of writing down my stream of thoughts for a few minutes every day has been the way it unexpectedly inspires me in aspects of my life that have almost nothing to do with the writing itself: my mental health, my music, professional endeavors, and relationships.
That is why this blog is so important to me. It’s not about clicks or popularity or meeting any sort of expectation. It’s simply about sharing my experience in the most painfully honest way possible. By speaking my truth in this way, I am laying my soul bare so that I may be readily inspired in my other creative faucets by what I discover within myself. If I get to recount some of the incredible things I’ve lived through, have some laughs, and remember how much I have to be grateful for, too, then I welcome those beautiful things as well. Most importantly, I hope sharing ideas and various segments of my life story, piece by piece can be of service to someone, somewhere, at some point. Even if one person, one year from now, were to discover my writing and find some small sliver of soul-brightening inspiration from some of my shared experience, then every minute of this will have been worth it. It’s funny how the smallest piece of something can travel quietly for years and years to change the world when we very least expect it…
…so I encourage you to write! At the very least, you’ll get a better chance to know that beautiful person living inside of you. What’s more, you just might change a life — or the world — one word at a time.
— Michael Winstead
