Dear Beautiful Humans,

This week I received another rejection letter from a revered and highly read publication, affirming again myself a rejected writer. Uh-hem, I must add rejected but NOT  DEJECTED. 🙂

I submitted a few writings this year that I’ve yet to share with you. Publications that accept unsolicited submissions typically won’t publish a piece that has appeared previously including blogs, unless of course you are … well, “published”.

Upon contemplation of my reasoning it seems this delayed sharing may be a waste of time. I mean … afterall YOU ARE THE REASON I write in the bloomin’ first place! I am not writing for acceptance, accolades, awards or approval: I write because I love people, namely YOU–dear souls who read my blog! Thank you for reading what I offer here. You are my reason. As I shared with my dear Elder, beloved friend and creative makerheart, Kate Stockman, I don’t necessarily write to be seen, but for the possibility that others may see themselves in my writing.

Tonight I offer a piece I submitted last winter. For this submission I wrote a third-person bio for myself as a “writer” which I find rather amusing to re-read. The essay or wordplay offers a glimpse of a battle in my mind about the intentional act of writing and using words to connect with people.

I hope you enJOY. I’d love to know what you think or feel.

Tokens
(WordPlay between Writer and her Words)

WRITER: Words. Words. Words. How when I cherish, collect, cultivate and revise thee, do you fail me?

How is it that when my heart floods with love for humanity and we begin our collaborative dance… Words, I choose you with intention—on my guard, on my honor—and yet you Words, hurt people!

WORDS: Oh you, you of too many of me. You little torch carrier. You aspirational human lighthouse. You do not understand me: You do not understand my spectrum of meanings.

You with your dictionary, your thesaurus, and your great Google Oracle! You think you have command of me, but you forget and neglect my potency when received by hearts not your own.

You believe your own limited interpretation and experience of me allows you to manipulate and fool your readers into becoming one with you, through me!

You cannot depend on me alone. I offer only pointers to your being of this world. I do not offer our readers the actual experience. Words are tokens.

Try as you may to edit, massage, rework, manipulate me, you can never truly bring someone completely into you. It is the problem—your human dilemma—this separateness of body, mind, spirit reality.

You are stuck.

Try as you may, sometimes you might get close to such connection—yet still you are not they, she or he. You are only thee—just a writer—separate and less than equal to those who read us.

WRITER: Have you quite finished? Have run out of yourself to say?

I heard you. I hear you. I hate you! And yet still, I fight for every single one of you. You, Words that fly through my being, through my heart, my hands and now through my fingertips.

With you I fight the separation. I fight to denounce human disconnection!

You are—my dear Words—paradoxically friend and foe; miraculously my greatest tool, my art supplies, my word paints, my linguistic box of matchsticks.

You + Me = Fire.

Together we can build fire to draw similar hearts closer to us, bridging the spacial divide.

We can write forth blazing, burning wordfires to replace chills in human bones with meaning and majesty.

Together we thwart these splinters of separation with a… an… uh…  INSERT WORD of hope.

Becky J. Suzik creates, mothers, and chases serial commas in Raleigh, North Carolina and online at beckyjaine.com. With hat-tips to an illness, she was awarded a complete career change in 2007 from marketing to creativity activism. She loves writing everything and aspires to one day write a profile that includes awards and books published –mentionables of her own.

❤ bjs