My Name Is Ben

“My name is Ben.”

Writing is hard…

It’s fulfilling, beautiful, expressive, therapeutic, and healthy…

But it’s hard.

Writing is hard because it forces you to solidify the thoughts that bounce around your head all day with only a vague outline like a ghost.

Writing is like turning a liquid into a gas, then a gas into a solid, then a solid to a liquid again.

Writing forces you to shake all your cultural beliefs and truly challenge your ideas until you find something that you personally believe to be true, not just what the mainstream is telling you to be true.

Writing is like completing a “connect the dot drawing” without any of the numbers. The ideas are laid out in front of you, and you know they make something interesting if you weave them all together….You’re just not sure how to do so, or where to even start.

Writing is also like a muscle. The more you leave it stagnant, the harder it gets to use. That’s why we have to use it everyday!

But writing is hard…

Sometimes when I sit down to write, I have no idea what to say. It often feels as if I don’t have anything in my head that I could say, but that concept is absurd. Simply say what you think.

We as humans think about things all day long. We think about work, family, taxes, food, love, etc. We think about things that make us happy and we think about things that we wish we never thought about at all.

When we sit down to write, the problem isn’t a lack of thoughts – no human’s brain is empty – it’s not knowing where to start.

When I struggle with this, I start with the facts. Mindless things that I know to be true that will get my mind, and my fingers, rolling.

“My name is Ben.”

Then I’m off to the races.