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What makes you keep on writing? If you’re a writer, then you’ve probably dreamt about winning some award or at least increasing your audience and having more people interested in what you have to write, but we don't all get that. Many of us write for ourselves and face rejection regularly from people who just can’t see the story the way we can. If you’ve dealt with tough criticism or rejection or doubt, what has motivated you to keep writing against it all? Let’s talk, keep it real and honest. The advice I find most genuine and reassuring wins. And while I have your attention, I’ve recently started a newsletter for writers that I hope to discuss everything about the writing community within. It’s FREE! You’ll just need your Email to receive it and be able to respond to it. Together we’ll tackle every aspect of the writing process and share tips and goals and progress and samples, maybe even have a few contests every now and then. If you’re interested, I explain my main goals and hopes for this community in my first post, and if you like it, just hit the subscribe button at the top to the right! Here’s the link (just copy-paste it): https://fatimaaladdin.substack.com/p/-writing-community- (This newsletter is for anyone who’s interested in writing, it in no way affects the results of this challenge, you don’t even have to participate to join!)

Mopping Up Eggs

In March 2020, I wrote about how I had one more month of Covid-19 to get through before it could all go back to normal. I was wrong. In a long short, autobiographical piece to become typical of me, in April of 2020 I wrote my first piece for Prose in three years. I pressed publish, hoping beyond hope my pain would be recognized by the internet.

March 2020 was a weird month. Fresh out of a psych unit, broken-hearted, and having quit my job (the first day Covid hit the west coast - Seattle - and I thought, whatever, that's like forever from here, what can happen?) I was rather desolate. My sister had cut ties with me, I had no one but myself and a computer screen.

I wrote a poem about cracking eggs against my frying pan and missing, too drunk to care. My roommate, the only other person I was to have contact with for the next three months, asked: "Do you really only have eggs and champagne in our fridge?"

The answer was yes, and not only was I not ashamed, I wrote about it.

And I started getting published.

This is a flash-forward to 2021. So far this year, I've had three pieces of mine published by various magazines. The are short prose link this. And every time I get published, I think: I've shared too much with the world.

I wrote about my sister, and she didn't even care. I sent her a piece I had published, one where I tore our family to shreds. She didn't blink. Or, at least, through the phone it didn't seem like she did. She said, "You know what? When Kim Kardashian wears a million dollar coat, it catches everyone's attention. She's making a statement."

I'm still thinking that one over.

Why do I write? I write because, as Charlie Sheen says on Two and a Half Men, "There are things inside of me I need to kill."

He actually says that while hugging a toilet on the show, drunk and throwing up, but I digress. Perhaps it's even more relevant to me, then.

I write because the things inside of me I need to kill need names written in ink. I plaster my emotions in print, feeling the weight of it all evaporate.

Even if, only after I write, I stop to consider who my writing could potentially hurt, I feel a freedom in that "publish" button. Who knows who will read my stories, who those people are?

If you've gotten this far, perhaps I've succeeded in at least planting a seed of something in you, and you'll take away from this something that makes you feel okay.