Prompt Post: And So I Write

And so, I write ...

Dorothy Chiotti

A good swift kick in the proverbial pants got my attention. A boss pulled me aside.

"Get that chip off your shoulder, she demanded. "I see potential, but you're too busy being a victim."

Well, I'm paraphrasing, of course, but it did kind of happen like that. I was in the secretarial pool at the time, and she saw something that I was too blind too see, even though it had been staring me in the face my entire life.

The creative spark. The wordsmith. The writer.

What went wrong? I can tell you what went wrong.

When I was 10 years old, a teacher accused me of plagiarizing a poem. A class assignment to write something about spring. I called mine, "Lambs in Spring." It goes as follows:

Little white balls of beautiful fluff,

Bouncing and prancing and that sort of stuff.

Baaing and whimpering here and there,

Sometimes they'll do nothing but stop and stare.

Crying for mother on a lovely spring day,

Mother comes running; decides to stay.

Bounding and twisting round and round

Looking for something no other lamb's found.

I read it in front of the class.

"Are you sure you wrote this?" he asked.

To my tender 10-year-old heart it was a blow. I was not a liar. I just loved words. But it cut me, and my confidence as a writer sank. Why write if no one would believe my offerings were word-smithed by me?

So, I shrank away from words, and had little confidence in my creativity. Until my boss gave me the wake-up call. The threat to fire me if I didn't get my act together. A difficult conversation was had after an equally difficult weekend of introspection and tears. Was she right? Was there more to me than met my eye?

Evidently so. For she made good and gave me the employee newsletter to design, write and edit. And I thrived in this new aspect of my work. And from there to corporate communications; to marketing; to advertising ~ so that by the time I left the workforce I was a confident writer.

For others.

But what about ... for me? What confidence did I have in revealing my soul to the world. Where was my voice?

Another journey. The inner journey. The quest for my voice. And the only avenue ... to write ~ and write some more. To be bad at it; terrified to share it; get better at it. Scream the words when appropriate. Not the words, the essence.

Can anybody hear me? Does anybody hear me?

Therapy, and lots of it. Getting unstuck from old self-concepts. Old ideas of my worth and how I see myself.

And then the horses. Another wake-up call. The horses reflecting my truth to me and declaring there is room for me; my energy; my truth; my voice.

The active voice.

And so, I write.

~*~

Posted on behalf of Dorothy Chiotti:

Dorothy Chiotti recently completed her debut novel, Murder on the High Cs, for which she is actively seeking an agent. She is a member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC), and lives in Mono, Ontario, with her husband and myriad four-legged friends. You can see more of her work at www.dorothychiotti.com.