I’m here. Behind the keyboard again. Where I feel most at home, most comfortable, most alive but also most terrified.

I’m here for one purpose, and one purpose only – to put something on this blank space. To reverse the lies that I’ve told myself for the past six months. The lies that said, You have nothing to write. Your creativity has dried up. You’re too tired. Too busy.

I’m here to coax a voice out of a smothered corner of my mind. The voice that tries to whisper, Just start writing. You love writing. Don’t be afraid of starting something without a goal in mind, without something to say. Write and discover what the words will say. 

So, I’m trying. But this line that you’re reading right now? I’ve typed and deleted it several times. Trying to find an idea to grasp on to. A string of words that settles warmly in the pit of my stomach, like the comfort of home-cooked food.

This was one of my fears. That’d I sit here staring at a screen with half a piece of writing. The other half lost in a forest of my emptiness.

Emptiness.

I let that word sit on the screen for several moments until it starts to morph into something unfamiliar in that strange way words do when you’ve repeated them too often.

Emptiness.

It’s a curse.
But maybe it’s also a key.

A curse when you allow your sense of emptiness to rob you of creating, of pouring out.
A key when you acknowledge your emptiness and start to search earnestly to fill.

I’ll take the key. Not the curse.

I’ve been empty. And there have been times where I’ve been so focused on my sense emptiness that I allowed it to stop me from creating. I allowed it to feed me untruths about who I was, Who I belonged to and what I was capable of. I allowed it to drain me of joy.

I scroll back to the top of the page.
Did I succeed?
Did I find something to stain these white pixels grey?

The evidence that is clear in front of my eyes should give me confidence. Yet I find it less compelling than that of the gentle hum that’s begun to echo through that indefinable place in my chest. That place that is the inexplicable measuring stick of fulfilment.

Emptiness.

Don’t let it be the curse that keeps you in a dry desert.
Let it be the key to set free that which would restore your desert to a meadow.