Witness Me

It's been challenging for me to write, these last few weeks. Life has been, well, life. Things have gotten away from me, caught up in the shuffle, bogged down in the muck and mire. I've been ripping and running, playing catch up and hold off and hold back. I've been messy and struggling with the perfectionist inside me that screams, "If you can't do it perfectly, do not try at all." I've been overwhelmed, and wanting a release from the responsibility of adulting in a complicated world.

Basically, I've been busy with the business of being human.

One thing that I've noticed in the midst of it all is the desire for my experience to be validated by others. I want someone to bear witness to my life, no matter how messy or beautiful, no matter how spectacular or underwhelming it may be. There is something inside me that wants to leave my mark, some evidence that I was here and that I mattered to someone, some place, or in some way. I think this is a very common desire, one that millennia of humans answered within their tribe, commune, or community. But we live in an age more distinct from any before it in that our tribe is now as far from us as the internet can reach, and sometimes there is no one from our community in our everyday lives. At least, that's how we feel or live. We live in this weird disconnected universe of screens, clicks, and likes in place of ceremony, ritual, oration or observation. The gift of witnessing is now a monetized, capitalized, quantified thing we must earn.

This realization has also kept my pen at bay; who am I writing FOR, anyway?

Writing is a solitary art. It's you and your ideas, some words, and a way to voice them. It is fundamentally the concretizing of the voice; it gives tangible form to something that would float into the air and away on the breeze. Writing is the primal urge to make something, that would otherwise be forgotten, memorable. It is history and dream, future and past, fact and feeling. Most writing happens in the forge of the mind long before a stroke of the key or pen is ever made. The steady stirring within, no matter what goes on around and about you, to put your senses on the page is a sensation nearly impossible to describe; it is a need.

And why do I have it? Why must I do it. Why can I not go without it?

I can't go without it because its the best way I know how to be. Without words, I feel airless, substance-less, being-less. Even when I'm not sitting down to transcribe it, the story in my mind is ever unfolding, the questions ever rising to the surface begging to be asked. Without this art, I am lost. Without the ability to share what rises up inside me, I feel as if I am not truly alive.

And I want a witness to my life. I want someone to bear witness to the voice I have, to share in the joy of hearing me and me hearing them. Though the work is solitary, I don't write to remain an island, rather to caste myself off as a life raft, gathering the lost at sea and bringing them to shore. I want my words to carry a message, a message that I see you and I see myself in you, that I see us in one another. I write the way the heart beats, to pump life blood through the body of which I am a part. The body as it is a collective of souls, the body of us who bear witness to one another.

I think we all desire this: to see and be seen, mirrors to one another.

For me, the way to this is writing. For you, it may be something else entirely. Maybe you don't think of it this way at all, the urgent instinct you have to connect. Maybe your perception of our need for connection is so totally opposite, that it in itself proves why we need one another. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need for thee," for they are of different functions, different perspectives, different experiences, different needs, yet still connected. What does the hand grab that the eye did not first perceive? What does the eye see, that the hand does not long to hold or repel?

What is it then, that drives you forward? What is the air within your lungs?

I cannot answer this for you. Perhaps I write this for an audience of one. I certainly have read and re-read this enough to take away as much as I have given it. I hope that you, too, can cradle this idea of a primal and urgent need to be seen. That you can be gentle towards the craving within yourself that cries out for a witness. We all want to be remembered, to leave a mark even if it is only made of water.

What I can say with certainty is that I write this for you:

the dreamer, the seer, the priestess, the policeman, the engineer, the chicken breeder and dog feeder and teacher, for the wanderer and homemaker, the one who soars above the clouds and the one who buries themself deep within the waiting ground, for the hater and the lover, even the user and abuser of others. I write this for the lost and lowly, the humble and the holy. I write this for the ones who are not yet seen...

You are seen with me.

As I look at you

Look back and see

Your beauty

Hear my words

See yourself as you are

and Witness me.