By Carmelene Melanie Siani

I worry about something.

I worry about how, being now a published writer and all, it makes me think my words are important…that what I have to say matters because what I have to say has been written and “published” rather than my merely having said them—in a bar, to a cab driver, to my children, to my husband for god’s sake.

I worry that I will think I am important because my words are seen in print.

I remember, way back in the 70’s, when I was doing the hippie/counseling thing, trained in Transactional Analysis and Gestalt by a psychologist thing, (before you had to actually have a college education or even a license to do such a thing) I was conducting a support group and someone challenged me.

“You sit in that big black chair and spew forth maxims as if they matter,” he said. “As if you know better and as if I don’t already know what you’re about to say.”

He was a big guy. A loud guy. And he was angry at me for saying what I had just said which was probably right on, which was why he was angry but didn’t know it, but still, he had a point and—

“You have a point,” I said.

He was so vehement, and so sure and I was so shaken by his threat to my so-called psychological authority, that I went home and thought about what he said.

“You sit in that chair and spew forth maxims as if they matter.” In fact, that’s what I was doing—spewing forth. “As if it mattered.”

It’s easy to do that when people pay you to do it. It’s easy to forget that, like the guy in my group said, “What I say actually does NOT matter.”

Okay. Sometimes, as a writer, (and probably sometimes even as a hippie counselor) I say something insightful. But it is only insightful because someone else is already thinking or feeling it and I have merely given it words and pointed it home.

But that’s the sum of it. That’s the sum of the gift—being able to put words to something that people are experiencing or that they already know without being able to put words to it. Or being able to tell a story about something that happened to me that didn’t exactly happen to the person who is reading the story but sorta’ kinda’ did and that they now recognize because I am writing about it.

But the truth is not that I know anything. I don’t.

I just know how to say it. And even then, as my mentor and great writing teacher told me way back in the 90’s when I discovered my gift, I struggle with the three great “sins” of writers (as he put it).

The “Ain’t I cute.” writer’s syndrome sin, the projection sin, that is, of course, thinking that because I think and feel it, so does everybody else, and the dreaded scourge of “purple prose” sin.

“Just say it in black and white,” he would say. “It doesn’t need to be purple.”

Even with his dictums however, even though I try not to be “cute” and try not to project and try not to use “purpose prose,” I worry that I might forget that the truth is that I basically know nothing and that I might forget that basically writing is a gift I was born with.

It is not a badge of honor for my ego to wear.

 

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

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