Impress/your soul

Don't write to impress. I mean, do by all means if that's your paying job, or if you have a teacher or professor to convince to give you a superlative grade.

But for your soul, write what is really important to you, not some outside audience. Impress your soul, if you will. And in your soul, be free. That is what souls are for.

If you are brave, you can and will share what is important--when you are ready and if you are willing. But right now, what is important is yours, to share or not, to examine, to love wildly. You can keep it in a desk drawer if you want. You can burn it, too, if you prefer, or delete it from your laptop.

My grandmother told me, her trick was this: whenever she got upset, she would put her thoughts on paper, and then burn them or tear them up without ever showing anyone. She has been gone now for almost fifty years. I wish I had those papers she destroyed. I wish I knew what was really going on. I wish I knew what really went through the minds of so many women whose thoughts were never recorded. I wish.

And sometimes I wonder: If all those important thoughts had been shared, would be perhaps live in a different reality from this in which so much was built on a scaffolding of silence?