Fireflies & Crickets
When I am unable to write due to life’s other demands, I visualize the ideas that live inside my head as little fireflies – trapped and bumbling around, bumping into the glass jar of my brain.
The inability to unscrew the lid and release them always makes me feel a bit twitchy and on edge (to my family’s delight!). It’s not even that I want to hit “publish” to share these bright (get it? Sorry…I’m a dorky pun-slinger at heart) ideas with the world. Sometimes, I just want to memorialize them in a journal to make room for new fireflies in my cranial jar. What use is their light if they are trapped inside of me? They are far more beautiful when they are all buzzing around in the night’s inky sky.
Eventually, I find the time and the courage to release some of these ideas, and I expect to feel this sweet rush of relief; however, oftentimes, that is not the case. The moment I get the words on paper or typed out on the screen, I am filled with this icy fear that I should scoop them all up and put them back in the jar. These feelings of fear are my crickets, and if I am not keeping a watchful eye, they will hop in with lightning speed and gobble up the beautiful little fireflies I worked so hard to release.
These crickets represent profound self-doubt, which is something I have come to realize most writers battle.
“This isn’t perfect yet. Don’t put it into the world.”
“Are you sure this is any good? Are your ideas even original?”
“Other writers are better at this. Stop typing. Hit delete.”
The crickets can be relentless, and it feels safer sometimes to keep the ideas locked away in my brain. The crickets can disguise themselves as elaborate excuses as to why I can’t write today or will manifest themselves into a laundry list of to-dos that I convince myself are more important/less selfish/safer than writing. Because of this, the pages of my journal remained blank for a long time, punctuated only infrequently with a firefly or two.
Staying quiet and holding our stories close to our hearts rather than generously sharing our hearts with the world is indeed safer, but stories are the connective tissue of generations. They bring people together, spark discussion, mend relationships, ease pain, and hopefully bring comfort.
So, I am ready once again to twist off the lid and let my fireflies soar into the night sky.
The only promise I make to myself is that I won’t let those crickets eat my fireflies. I won’t hold back for fear that it isn’t perfect or that someone won’t like it, or that “it isn’t as good as others.”
This is for me, for you, for anyone who delights in stories.
Yours till fire flies,
Jo
