Doubt

The kids were out the door by 7:15.  I was ready to get out for a walk by 7:30, but the sky was spitting.  Still is.  The day is dark, dreary and tinged with notes of nostalgia, and I'm just not sure I'm up for weathering the weather today.  Pandora is on in the background, but it keeps becoming my foreground.  I'm easily sidetracked today by one song or another.  Some I have to sing along with like Fast Car or Hallelujah, and others like Helplessly Hoping and Dust in the Wind  I have to cry through.  Blackbird  plays. I find myself dusting off my guitar only to put it back in its case completely discouraged before the song is over.  Who am I kidding? 

This is what can happen to a day when best laid plans don't pan out.  This is what can happen to coveted free time when I get in my own way.  I want to do everything and so I do nothing.  I want to write, but I am going in one hundred directions and the words are firing faster than I can even make sense of them.  I want to create, capture and express, but I have zero focus and only building stores of frustration.  That little naysaying voice in my head is no longer faint or distant.  It has a bullhorn.  It broadcasts all my failures and shortcomings.  It harps on my weaknesses and deficiencies on repeat, and it sure knows how to strip me naked of all my defenses and armor.  I am exposed as a fraud.  Who do I think I am?

The thing is: I know who I am. I 'm stronger than this voice in my head.  Just as resilient too.  I know how to turn it down until it's only annoying background noise again.  I quiet it by doing the very thing it accuses of me of not being able to do.  If I just start writing, the words eventually flow and come together to tell this story that lives inside me because I am a writer not a fraud.  I am a writer because I write.  It's all up to me.  I'm only kidding myself.