My coffee cup sits half empty at the table. It is tepid and still as the morning fog of my anxious thoughts permeates my stream of consciousness. I should really prepare something to eat and brew another pot of coffee before my troubles run away with my mind. It’s felt very difficult to concentrate lately, and I have been craving the sort of carefully planned structure and consistency in my daily routine that I am used to. Instead, I have been resigned to this limiting place in my mind where resources feel thin and my capacity feels overstretched. Living this way invokes a stinging feeling of quiet trepidation that paralyzes my sense of self. Sadly, I have become a frequent flyer to this platform, whose departure takes me away from my usual focus and clarity. These days, it feels like all I do is worry.

I have not felt like myself these last few months. It was only a year ago that I was moving full steam ahead with plans of finding an agent to publish my first book. Today, though, when I look in the mirror, I wonder if I can even call myself a writer anymore. The ambitions which once set my soul aflame now feel dead in the water compared to the daily struggle of my distracted existence. I have started to wonder if I am a failure. My creative aspirations lay malnourished on the floor in the chamber of my mind, cutting off the blood supply to my dreams which at one time gleamed brilliant and unwavering. Without my thoughtful efforts to nurture them, they are truly helpless.

It is my belief that the inability or unwillingness to share our vocation with the world is a disservice to humankind. Some might say it is a sin. If our hearts speak a language or sings a song that someone else who is hurting can understand, we should do everything we can to share it with them. This weighs on me heavily. I don’t want to turn my back on what I know I was meant to do when I was brought to this earth. This notion spins a thread of desperation that entwines my spirit in a very personal sense of shame. With every day that passes, so does the momentum I worked so hard to gain when I was insistent on making my dreams a reality, causing tendrils of doubt and admonishment to encircle my thoughts: a loser. A nobody. A failure.

From my kitchen table, I don’t appear to be in any immediate trouble to the unknowing onlooker. I am just a normal looking thirty-something year old woman having coffee in the morning before the world gets going. If you look more closely, there is a different air in the static around me, defined by my shoulders that hang limply as I stare aimlessly across the table. It is the air of someone who is trying to grapple for hope. I probably look just a little tired. Inside, though, I am crying out to myself:
Start. Just start. Begin again. Be true to yourself.

I am trying to find the courage to be.