Drunken writing

Hi, my name is Amber, and I'm a drunk. 

Yeah, it happens.  I get all self-righteous about how I write for the "right" reasons, meanwhile daily checking how many people are reading my posts or hoping for the rare comment, fretting about how my following isn't growing and how my readership has declined in the past several weeks.  I write a frantic post disguised as the musings of a writer, when really, I'm starved for validation, and then, I wake up with a vague tingle of embarrassment the next morning.  Like, I'm pretty sure something happened last night that I don't wish to acknowledge. 

It's called self intoxication.  I hate to say, I know it well.  I'm just good at hiding it, most of the time.

I border on priding myself on being real in my writing, and the first thought I have this morning when I see the one comment on my last post, is "Damn, I should delete that post altogether."  As in, hehe, no one needs to see that real me - the needy writer me - so let's just send it into the void of oblivion and pretend it doesn't exist.  Pretend I don't care what people think of me or my writing or whether or not I'm good enough to make it or why I'm not as "popular" as others.  Uck.  It's disgusting.

But when my reader commented yesterday, sharing some of her own thoughts and struggles in this process of being a writer, it was like she lovingly shook me from my drunken stupor.  It hurt.  And I'm so glad she did it.

On her blog, she wrote these words that carve to the depths of my soul: "And then it comes to me: God’s listening.  I create simply for the joy of creating.  My words are an offering and a sacrifice, and I can imagine no other audience that matters more. I am an artist. I offer up these small gifts, my brown-paper stories filled with sparkling words.  And that matters, even if no one else is paying attention."

I know them.  I believe them.  I don't do as good a job as I'd like to think at living them.  I breathe a sigh of relief that she had the courage to write them in her own beautiful voice.

I'd like to promise it won't happen again, that from this day forth I will no longer care if no one else but God is paying attention to my words.  I know I write because I feel the words burning inside me and I am compelled to share them.  But in the end, if God was my only fan, why feel deflated about that?  After all, he's the one who puts the words there in the first place.  I just need to listen and pour them back out to him.

And I'll always be a recovering drunken writer.