WRITING | SELF-IMPROVEMENT | SPIRITUALITY
This Writing Has Me Feeling Heavy
I want to write every day, but I also want to avoid becoming a charlatan.
There’s something I almost got swept up with that I’m glad I became self-aware of before getting dragged away by the current.
It has to do with parroting advice and wisdom before I’ve made the attempt to implement it in my own life to see if… well… it actually delivers results.
Because let’s be honest, dear reader.
A lot of us are here struggling on Medium or other writing platforms because we’re feeling heavy and like we’re out of gas, at least when it comes to “mainstream” society and the way it constantly strips away your freedoms.
We’re feeling like the world is where dreams go to die.
We’re all grown up and stuck wondering what the hell happened to the imaginations we had as kids when it seemed as if anything was possible, when it seemed as if life was more than an endless progression of drudgeries.
And in our desperation to want to make it as writers we’ve come into contact with a real danger, one that’s better to face sooner rather than later so that we don’t end up losing our soul in the process of rediscovering our imagination.
It boils down to this question, “What separates a charlatan from a genuine teacher and/or mentor?”
Most people would readily admit that they have no desire to be a charlatan, nor be duped by one.
We’d all like to speak from the authority of experience, of knowing what we say is true because it had a direct impact on our lives.
It’s a slippery slope toward becoming a charlatan when we’re dealing in the realm of ideas, and in particular, ideas pertaining to spirituality and self-improvement.
This is a domain rife with people seeking out what they want to hear, myself included.
And in such a domain, it’s easy to take the ideas you so desperately want to be true for yourself and immediately repeat them to others, without having first taken the time to test them out in your own life.
Sorry if those italics seem harsh, but this sort of came as a rude awakening to me.
For a while there, my desire to “keep up with the Joneses” of the writing world was fueling this urge to publish something every day.
The only problem with that is that I’m a 27-going-on-28-year-old guy still grappling with the post-college blues (aka: confronting reality) and who doesn’t really have a handle on anything in life yet.
I’m trying to make sense of a world that used to make sense to me, but no longer does, and I wonder if it ever will.
This is a feeling that makes me question myself a lot, and as a result, forces me to oscillate between feeling overly confident in my writing one day, and underconfident the next.
I’ve pulled a little back from the urge to get something published every day and I feel better for it. When I do sit down to write something, it feels more inspired and real, and so I’ve stopped oscillating so much.
But when that urge was getting the better of me, I discovered I was forcing thoughts out just for the sake of writing, and the result was that I was regurgitating, rather sloppily, the most recent ideas I had come into contact with, usually from other writers on Medium.
I was clinging to the words I wanted to hear given my current situation in life and the difficulties I face. Words that soothed, words that helped inspire hope, yatta yatta.
What’s worse is that this was all caught up with the desire to make money from my writing, and I eventually decided that yes, I was indeed allowing that desire to have an impact on my principles as a thinker.
I was rushing toward words but without knowing whether or not those words were true to my experience, or something I merely wanted to be true.
These factors, when taken together, are a lot to reflect on before anyone really goes all-in on freelance writing.
Or at the very least, for anyone who doesn’t want to become a borderline-plagiarizing charlatan that makes money off a word hustle that lacks real substance underneath.
It’s really easy to become that these days. This is what I’ve woken up to.
Social media makes it seem as if everyone is getting ahead, driving our urge to do so as well. So we take to the keyboard or the video editor to crank, crank, and crank out more content, thinking that’s what we need to do to become relevant.
But in reality, very few people are getting ahead. Most people are racing toward the bottom, only they don’t know it yet.
And what does the bottom that everyone is racing to look like?
It looks a lot like endlessly regurgitated, boring, unoriginal, and uninspiring content devoid of anything we might call a human soul.
That, to me, is something I must take steps to studiously avoid, even if it means not doing “what I need to” to come out ahead in the online writing racket.