Want new and different ways to disappear? Just ask a writer.

For those who admire writers and what they do, the thought of writers being invisible is bizarre, laughable even. “You’re living my dream,’ a dear friend once gushed to me. I stood in front of her feeling like she didn’t see me at all. We move through the world, we writers, committing heart-felt words to paper, giving voice to other peoples stories, speaking to the world in varied tones depending on what the world wants to hear – our words bringing comfort, amusement, fire … expanding knowledge or providing escape.

All this and invisible? Seriously?

Let me count the ways.

There is the invisibility of abundance. Writers are everywhere. Bookstores are bulging. Bookshelves are overflowing. Even those writers considered highly visible with awards and accolades and top spots on the bestseller lists are buried in the piles of books straining for audiences, grasping for buyers, languishing in the piles of ‘waiting to read’ in booklovers’ homes the world over. Words vetted and curated and published and purchased are buried, forgotten even, in plain sight. And those are the lucky ones.

There is the invisibility of familiarity. When is the last time you savoured a sunrise? The most spectacular light show in the universe, playing daily free of charge, and most of us don’t take time to enjoy it. We assume the sun has risen by the light cast on our ringing alarm and frantic pre-work/pre-school breakfast. Writers every day are weaving magic with words, fuelling the world with social media posts and SEO, news and directions, entertainment and insights. Like the sun, writers show up every day. As feeds are scrolled  or pages are flipped, it is assumed words will be where and what is needed.

There is the invisibility of dismissal. Everyone’s a writer. Everyone’s writing. You have a book? So do I. So do they. So do thousands more. Not a best seller? No agent? No book deal? No shelf space. Pitching a publisher? Join the pile and roll the dice.  Oh, here, can you whip up 10 pages of dialogue/ two chapters/ a newsletter/insert assignment here by the end of the day? How hard can it be?

There is the invisibility of concession. Do what the client wants. Follow the specs, the guidelines, the rules. Be a tool for others’ needs rather than an instrument of your own creation. Use money as a justification to give others’ work priority over your own. All combine to give a life gleaming with purpose and profit. Your words become martyrs to the cause.

Why, oh why do folks aspire to be writers or continue to be writers in such a dismissive, indifferent world? One simple answer: it’s the perfect place to hide. The realms of invisibility exist because writers are adept at creation, and they create these places of hiding in plain sight to be safe from the world, from themselves. However, as master storytellers, writers blur the line between fact and fiction in these realms of their creation. There is no safety in invisibility. There is only smallness and silence, and writers were born to live large and be heard. Why are so many writers such tortured souls? Squeeze your immenseness into a tiny box for years and see how it feels. Bind yourself with self-doubt, guilt at being successful when so many others struggle, the need to please publishers and editors and readers and the master manipulators of the best seller metrics and then try to soar as your spirit was intended. No need for a freezing writer’s garret to make writers suffer. We do it to ourselves with every breath.

So, what is a writer to do?

Life is breath, life is choice, second by second, Breathe deep into the base of your spine, where your spirit meets tissue. Who are you? Who can you become? How does the godforce that you are choose to live today? How does writing serve your choices? Then choose you. And let the ideas, the words, the work, flow from the Signal that you are. If you see you, invisibility becomes not inevitable, but yet another tool you can choose, or not, to live your life.

What will I do? Today, I watched the sun rise. I wrote this blog. Choice by choice, it’s a day waiting for my creation.

Thanks for reading.