I’ve been dreaming a lot. I’ve also been aging a lot.

After a while, one has got to win and the other must forfeit. Lately, I’ve been letting age win, but that doesn’t mean that dreaming has stopped.

Since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer. Writing was never about anything but a wind that only I could feel. Writing was never about capability, punctuation, or approval. It was about perfection; finding the combination of words, sounds, expressives that most perfectly fit to convey a thought in my own mind. Perfection. The urge itself was poetry, a streamlined unconscious effort to love myself into art.

Writing, as a child, was pure. Completely uncensored, I wrote about crushes, injustice, poverty, Lent, and fear. Writing, then, was simple with no hunches of my own shoulders, no computer screens, or query letters. Writing was as private as it was sacred. My own life, recorded, by my own hand.

I’ve recently moved forward in my writing. This blog, this conglomeration of stories, news, identity, and links has morphed into something that I ponder. It’s information, but it’s not my writing.

Writing on my stomach on the hardwood floors of my bedroom was peace. Writing about confusion at 13 was so honest, probably more honest than my confusion at 28. At 28, on a blog, you wonder how it will be read. I didn’t used to care. For some reason, now, I care more. That confession deflates me.

There is more to my life than my confessions. There is more to me than my relationship to my husband. There is more to me than being a woman of color. I am. I am. I am so much more than this blog, more than one blog will ever allow.

The world doesn’t care about non-identified people and the world doesn’t care to hear if you’re not credible. In the middle of the night, on any given night, I ask myself what, then, does the world need me for?

I’m finding I care more about what the world thinks of my words than what I think of them myself. I care more about what publishers, and noteable women, and loud men, and stat counters have to tell me than the sound of my own voice. How did I come to that? More importantly, how do I get out?

Knowing full well that this is not true, I think the world is moving forward without me. All around me, everywhere, friends are beginning families, going back to degree programs, publishing their work, saving money for a home, deepening their spirituality, and finding themselves in very uplifting, very evidence-rich ways. In a room, alone, with one lamp as my witness, all I have are quiet nights and drafts unedited.

The dreams inch into darker corners and the devils come out to dance around me. I begin to wish I had wings. I wish I wasn’t alone.

The pain of rejection and self-doubt redistributes all that you thought you achieved in life. The shares in your pockets are smaller, the rations of perseverance discouraging. The soundtrack of my life was drums, guitar, flute, and sax. And now, one line of a violinist.

I’m pretty self-indulgent right now and I think that’s what happens when one questions the validity of our own dreams. That girl, that honest girl with handwritten cursive and pen marks on her cheek – I’d like to see her tonight and remember that she isn’t that far away from who I have grown into.