Words don't come easy

I've been beating myself up for not writing as much lately. 

I've been struggling with a beautiful dilemma. Do I listen to the wind blowing through the pages of my notebook, or do I pick it up and silence the music with my pen?  I've been scared of writing about my experiences, because I am scared of losing them once they hit the pages of my book. In my head I can twist and turn in ways my pen hasn't been able to follow up with. I think there are ghosts and monsters and dragons living under my skin and they are whispering through my veins, threatening to eat my words and ideas - swallowing them whole! They are telling me that my words will be chewed and spat out again ugly, only to scare whoever comes by them. My ideas aren't as great as I believe them to be. My words aren't as inspirational as I'd like them to be. My stories are better off untold, because once they are told I can't erase them or forget them or even detach my name from them. The whispers have kept me from writing. Scared of the judgement, scared of the unknown and scared of the fear.

Then there is another side of the story. There always is.

The dilemma is beautiful in multiple tunes and I am wondering when I started believing that the song of my pen is less musical than the wind? I am getting older and with that comes the basic truths of life. Not just the ones of the heart conquering the head, but the ones where memories get lost in the trail of thought and that red thread through my stories is a slow fading pink. The dance that my pen does is so often out of my control, but who's to say that I won't find it's rhythm if  I just let it lead. Who's to say it can't find my threads, written in the folds of my notebook and pull them out to dance too? The ghosts are old teachers and mentors, the monsters jealous friendemies and as I've recently learned,  dragons are sometimes scared of fire too! My stories are best when told, and although unerasable, they are forever interchangeable. My name attached to the words is a testament, yes, but not of who I am hoping to be by writing them, not of the inspiration I wish to be, but of the inspiration I found in you. In the trees, in the walls, in the taste buds of my past and in the wind in my book. Yes, I am scared. But I've come to realize that more than anything in the world, more than the ghosts, the monsters, the dragons and the words. I am scared of being fearless. But there are things I would like to fear less. Writing is no longer one of them.