Writing to be read

I read this line sometime ago:

"Your problem is you are writing to be read."

It struck me like one of those Oprah Winfrey Aha! moments. I paused. I realized, in that quiet instant, how often I had silenced the writer in me for the sake of an imagined audience. I am guilty—more often than I’d like to admit—of prioritizing “them” over the raw pulse of my own thoughts.

There were times I had little to no readers at all. Yet I would read my own words through someone else’s eyes, critiquing myself as if I were a stranger. I chose each word carefully, crafted each line meticulously, hoping it would appeal, hoping it would belong. Belong to what? To them. To “the writers.”

Growing up, I realized that chasing labels, running after approval, is a task more exhausting than any labor of the body. You don’t have to mimic someone to be someone. You can be a writer effortlessly, in the simplest of acts: lying in bed, curled beneath a warm blanket, typing into the void. You could send your thoughts out into emptiness, never knowing if they land anywhere, never needing them to.

I imagine myself standing in a lonely valley, encircled by massive, ghostly mountains. No signs of life, no eyes to judge, no echoes but my own. And then I shout—everything I feel, everything I think. I hear my voice ricochet and swell, unclaimed and unbroken. That, to me, is writing. That, to me, is freedom. You can speak anything aloud, and the mountains only hold it. They do not reply. They do not demand.

I don’t claim to know the right or wrong way to write, nor do I believe such rules truly exist. But I do know this: removing “them,” the other person, the invisible critic, from your art is emancipating. Why should “them” exist in your process at all? Every idea, every flicker of thought born within you deserves release, deserves to breathe, deserves to exist without being filtered through expectation.

Writing to be read may win applause. Writing to be lived—the true writing—wins freedom.