To write is to bleed.

I view writing as a personal endeavor. Writing in the truest form emerges when I am writing for no one but myself. When I am left alone with my thoughts – that is when everything makes sense and comes together.

Ernest Hemingway once said,

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

And there is truth in these words.

Bleeding means revealing what others cannot see, what they have never seen, and what you might be afraid to see. You must not be afraid to be vulnerable. You must accept the blood you pour onto the paper as your own. You must write with no other intention than to relieve your poor soul from the constraints of logic and theory and embrace the words that you arrange so feverishly in front of you as the very particles from which you are made.

Your writing is your own – when it is inside your head. As soon as you let those thoughts escape from the imaginary confines of your mind and into the realm of reality, they take on a life of their own. You are no longer their sole possessors. Those words are for the world to discover, to mold, to mend, to tear, to indulge.

Here is where you will find peace. The comfort of your words becomes the savior of another, and then you will be writing for an audience of two, and then you will understand how selfish you were to think that you could keep all this to yourself. Writing is for you; it is for me; it is for us. It is for the brave, and the weak, and the lonely, and the scared. It is here, and it is good.