We live in vicious times. With all the resources and riches, material and otherwise, available to us, we have turned on ourselves.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled ‘Help, my book is eating me’. It was code. Message in a cyber bottle. For it is not the book that is eating us, it is the vicious voices in our head.
This inner self we keep feeding is a monster. No matter how much of ourselves we sacrifice to her wants and ways she is never ever satisfied.
The ‘inner self’ is not the psyche, what the ancient Hellenes called soul.
The inner self is a modern invention and I for one have had enough of her.
She’s there in all her monstrous guises in every writing program I’ve ever run, halls of mirrors of the monster within gobbling up all that is good and brave about the writer seeking her voice.
And I for one am glad I’ve walked and written her out … although she never leaves.
I see her in the writing circles, there and there and there and there, telling spirited women they are too stupid to write a book, too foolish to want to try … all the prisms of untalented, unworthy, time-wasting a human woman can summon to trash what her psyche most longs for.
And whether pilgrimage or writing or both, what psyche most longs for is self-aligned expression in the world.
Here I am, self made matter, self on the page, here I am, beyond the stories and painful impositions of others, visible in the world as I know myself to be.
This is another reason why writing is the bravest thing we’ll ever do. We overcome. We learn to outshine the riot within, we call out the liar, we outwit the thief.
Ultreia! We keep going.
Stephanie Dale is an award-winning journalist, author, researcher and founder of the International Wellbeing-through-writing Institute. In 2014 she launched The Write Road, a wellbeing-through-writing initiative for rural and remote Australians. She is passionate about pilgrimage, and in 2017 initiated Walk&Write holiday writing adventures.