everything is rubbish

but keep writing anyway

Thesauruses are wonderful things :)

I realized belatedly that this month marks 3 years that I have been writing here on Substack. November 2022 doesn’t seem that far away and yet it is 36 months. 36 months of writing and showing up whether or not life was easy or hard. Putting pen to paper even when there were items nagging for attention (I’m looking at you dirty dishes) and just sitting in the chair to write.

3 years ago, I shared my first post on Substack. I wrote about the difficulty of finding support after having a child and that the “village” that we’re supposed to have as parents just doesn’t hold true the way it used to. Family members are scattered across the country and not as tight of a unit anymore. I know this doesn’t hold true for everyone and am not painting all with a broad brush, but this was something that held true for me at the time, navigating the new waters of being a mother.

Even rubbish words are more powerful than a blank page. In fact, they are much more powerful, because there can be no magnum opus later without those rubbish words now. -Greg McKeown

In all my years of writing online, there have absolutely been some posts that in hindsight, I wasn’t too keen on. Maybe I didn’t put in enough effort or maybe there was too much effort, and I could have edited it a bit. And yet, there are posts that I have written that I have truly laid my heart out onto the page and have really been proud of those particular pieces of writing. Either way, it’s all rubbish at first. But the point is, the gold is in there somewhere. You have to keep writing.

The first blog I ever had, I wrote about personal finance. The Great Recession had knocked us all sideways and getting out of debt and saving money were hugely popular at the time and I thought I had found my niche. But after several years of beating the personal finance drum, I realized this topic wasn’t for me anymore. But rather than putting away my laptop forever, I changed topics, I changed my blog, and I pivoted in a different direction.

Why? Because something in me needed to keep writing.

And so, I wrote. I got the words on the page. Not everything is going to be Hemingway-esque. Nor does it need to be. We just need to write. We need to make mistakes. We need to make typos. We need to use the wrong font. We need to make use of a dictionary. We need to dig out our thesaurus because that word we really want to use is on the tip of our tongue, but gosh we just can’t think of it.

We need to get our words out there and we need to be okay with the fact that sometimes it’s rubbish.

A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. - George Bernard Shaw

So, friends, I implore you. Keep creating your art. This doesn’t just pertain to writing. Keep painting, keep drawing, keep sculpting. Keep baking, keep photographing, keep crocheting. Whatever your artistic endeavor, please don’t stop. No matter how many mistakes, no matter how many crumpled pieces of paper in the wastebasket, please keep creating.

Please don’t stop.

The world needs your art.