“I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seeds every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree’s way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling its treasure on the wind.” May Sarton, Recovering, A Journal (1979)
It is a perennial challenge for any kind of writer to continue giving of him or herself on a daily basis, at the keyboard or with pen in hand, because the motivations have to be internal. And we don’t always believe in ourselves or the work we are doing. Many of us like to think we are affecting people in the present or maybe even in the future, but we don’t really know how much impact we have. May Sarton wrote the above quote when she was 81 years old, and had published 27 books.
And yet how many writers do I know who continue to write, continue to believe in what they are doing, day after day, because they feel compelled to do so. The big fear,the big leap is that when you spend so much time and energy doing something , putting so much of yourself into it, you have no idea if anything will come of it. Surely you cannot expect any financial rewards, but writers seem to accept that. It is harder to accept the fact that we don’t know if we will ever reach our audience. Even harder to start out not knowing if we will ever be any good at the kind of writing we want to create.
For myself it has come about over the years that nothing else I have done or attempted to do has been as internally satisfying as writing, this despite other things I have done being more lucrative in a financial, social, or status way. And this is the same thing you hear from writers throughout time.
Accepting that writing as part of life, or as the dominant part of one’s life, has its own drawbacks and its own price, is only made up for by saying nothing else feels right. This is a sort of strange logic to explain to someone who has not felt it.
It is a never-ending conundrum: I say and feel I write for myself, but know that I am not being comp0letely honest with myself when I say that. I want to reach people who will at least understand my point of view.