The Grace of Being Unimportant

Once upon a time, I thought I wanted to be important (and simply assumed I would be one day). Not necessarily "red carpet important," but book deal important. Someone-mentions-you-in-an-essay important. 

I thought being seen meant being validated, and being validated would mean I'd finally feel real –– something I've struggled with my whole life.

Now I somehow find myself craving the opposite. The smallness, the obscurity, and the holy invisibility of a life lived just for you, maybe a few tomato plants, and a couple of dark-eyed juncos willing to bear witness without judgment. In fact, "unimportant" might be the most freeing, spiritual, and quietly powerful thing I’ve ever allowed myself to be.

So, if you’ve ever whispered a spell no one heard, made something beautiful that never left your hard drive, or planted something just to see it grow, you already know this. Welcome. You’re not alone.

The Pressure to Matter (Loudly)

Let’s be honest. These days, we live in a world where everyone’s supposed to be building a brand. Every last one of us is supposed to have (and want) an audience, a content strategy, and at least one platform where we’re semi-viral or absolutely killing ourselves trying. 

Even spiritual growth gets pulled into this vortex. Your tarot pull better be Instagram-worthy. Your altar had better be aesthetic. Your journal entries? Possibly one day publishable. Everything becomes potential content.

It’s exhausting. 

And worse, it makes you start to feel like even your private moments aren’t valuable unless someone claps for them. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but despite how it probably feels most of the time, you don’t need claps and likes. You need peace and presence. You need the moss that grows on your soul when you finally take a moment to be still.

What Obscurity Gave Me

Getting older has naturally meant slowing down quite a bit. It's also meant making better choices about where I spend my energy and realizing that the real currency in life is peace. Eventually, I realized I was no longer really interested in chasing importance anymore, and some really strange and beautiful things started happening.

I started enjoying my own company again. I remembered how much I love writing things just to see the words pour onto the page. I lit candles for spirits who never asked me to post about them. I grew a garden that I never really photographed, but walked through many mornings while listening to music. I created without pressure, and I made a connection to something larger than me without needing it to be capital-S Special.

Fine China and Swine

They said she was mad.

Not with any sentiment as dark as malice, or at least not exactly. They just used that tongue-clucking, tilted-head tone people use when someone stops playing by the rules. When someone removes the lace from the curtains and starts growing wildflowers instead of roses.

“She actually used to be... sort of normal,” the butcher muttered to the baker. “She taught piano. Had that shy, quiet little husband who sold shoes. What was his name again?”

They no longer exactly remember, and maybe that was always the point.

She didn't take much when she left the house on Hazel Street. Just her books, her perfume, and three heavy trunks of clothes she hadn’t worn in years — gowns she once called “ridiculous” and now called “essential.” She also took a single teacup with a crack in it and a chipped plate shaped like a scallop shell. 

She left the wedding china. She'd never actually wanted it anyway.

The farmhouse was already hers, an inheritance from a great-aunt no one remembered. It sat just past the willow grove, just down a little dusty dirt road that likely hadn’t seen a carriage in half a century. The house was crooked, and the roof leaked in four different places. Sometimes crows congregated on the roof after a storm, looking for wayward bugs and other prizes. It was perfect.

The pigs came with the land.

They were half-feral and vaguely pink, with beady dark eyes like muddy marbles. At first, she only watched them from the window, wary. But then one day, she noticed they had been watching her, too, in that way animals do when they know something about you that you don’t yet know yourself. First, she fed them. Then, she talked to them, tentatively and quietly. Then, she danced with them in the golden hour, as it seemed like the most appropriate time for such goings-on.

“They say I’m mad,” she told them one evening, reclining on the grass in a dress the color of old, dried blood. “But the truth is, I’m just finished.”

And she was. She was finished apologizing for her voice, her laugh, and her hunger for all sorts of exciting things. Finished folding herself into half-measures and polite silences. She was definitely finished saying "thank you" when what she really wanted to say was "don’t touch me."

The pigs didn’t answer, but one of them placed a gentle snout in her lap in a silent show of support. That was enough.

The townspeople took to whispering when they passed her gate. She never locked it, because she didn’t have to, because no one dared go past the willow trees. “She feeds them by hand,” someone whispered. “I hear she even lets them into the house,” hissed another. One woman claimed she saw candles in every window, all lit at once, like a séance or a wedding was going on inside. Maybe even something worse.

“She’s always alone,” the grocer’s wife said. “Except for the pigs.”

That part was true.

But she liked being alone. (For now, anyway.) She liked the silence of wide rooms with no one in them who was asking her to shrink for no good reason. She could light all the candles she wanted simply because it pleased her. She wore perfume because it made her feel like a badly-kept secret. She poured red wine or Earl Grey tea into fine china and sat on the porch at dusk, surrounded by soft oinks and rich golden light while crows squawked in the distance.

Sometimes she laughed. Loud, unfiltered laughter that rose through the trees and made birds scatter. “She was always a little touched,” the librarian said. “Even before the divorce.” No one ever mentions what happened to the husband. Not anymore.

But occasionally, someone swears they saw him at the edge of the grove once. They say he had mud on his cuffs and a nasty scratch down one cheek. His eyes were wide and startled like someone who had seen a ghost that looked an awful lot like regret.

No one asked questions. No one really wanted answers. Meanwhile, she lived.

She embroidered things that didn’t really need embroidery, just because. She read poetry to the pigs. She bathed beneath the stars, unashamed. Sometimes she wore the crown she made from rusted nails and ivy and laughed like a woman who finally understood the joke.

They said she was mad.

But the pigs followed her everywhere, and the wind listened when she felt like talking. And every time she raised her cracked teacup to the setting sun, the whole world paused, just for a second, to see what she would do next.

* This freewriting exercise is part of the full moon edition of the Feast of the Wandering Pen, a lunar-centric writing challenge about consistency, creativity, and storytelling.

A Place at the Table

There’s a certain kind of waiting that doesn’t come with a countdown. There's no circled date on the calendar to count down to. No confirmation email. There won't eventually be a light knock on the front door to let you know it’s finally arrived.

Instead, it’s the kind of waiting that feels like static under the skin — like a faint humming in the walls. And though you don’t know what you’re waiting for exactly, you do know you’re waiting. You know it the way you know rain is coming, even if the sky is still clear and blue.

I feel like I've been on a first-name basis with that kind of waiting lately. I'm not waiting for a person. I'm not expecting a package (or at least not currently). But I know I'm waiting for something. I just can't name it or identify it.

Sometimes I think I hear it. There are soft footsteps in the distance and maybe even the rustle of a hem brushing the ground. So I’ve lit the candles. I’ve cracked the window. I’ve tidied up the space around me to the best of my ability, the way people do when company’s coming.

This kind of waiting doesn’t look like much from the outside. On the inside, it's a different story. It's present when my dreams shift tone, color, and content overnight. It has an invisible hand that directs my attention toward certain books, songs, and vibes.

Sometimes I think it has a scent, as well. Some days, that scent is a mixture of ozone and rose petals. Other days, maybe almond and salt.

Whatever it is, it lingers in the corners of the room and settles into the folds of the day. It inspires me to light a second stick of incense –– not because the first wasn’t enough, but because something just plain wants more smoke in the air. A thicker veil between what already is and what still might be if I keep still enough for long enough.

I'm trying not to name the unknown thing too soon. I’ve made that mistake before and decided too early what a thing must be, only to discover it was something else entirely. Sometimes, it's something better, or stranger, or softer. Sometimes it turns out to be something not meant for me after all, leaving me disappointed and deflated.

So this time I'm trying to exercise patience and presence. And the kind of faith that doesn’t need to be told what’s coming to justify leaving the light on for it, just in case it shows up in the middle of the night.

Thankfully, I also feel like there's something sacred about preparing for what hasn’t yet arrived. Setting the table for someone who may or may not come. Choosing the best dishes in preparation for a coming celebration. Folding the napkins. Lighting the good candles.

Maybe that’s what this particular type of waiting really is. A quiet honoring of possibility, and maybe even a form of devotion. To the next season of my life and to the version of myself that’s still out there somewhere, trying to find the door. I don’t know her name yet, but I want her to feel welcome.

I think that’s why I’ve been moving slower, listening harder, refusing to fill the silence just for the sake of making noise like so many other people out there do. There’s a certain peace in the spaces between things, and I want to make sure I hear what she has to say when she finally sits down.

So I keep doing the small, quiet things that feel like invitations –– writing down dreams even when they make no sense, walking circles in the garden at 11 o'clock in the morning, whispering yes into the flame when no one is around.

Because something is coming. And whatever it is, I don’t want to miss it because I was too busy trying to define it. So I wait. And I stay lit. And I write, because that’s my way of keeping the door ajar.

* Another candle lit on the table for the Feast of the Wandering Pen, a lunar journey through creative reflection in all its many forms.

Things I Know, Even When I'm Quiet: A Litany

You'll never catch me saying that I know something until I've applied it somehow and proven to myself that it's probably true. Before that, it's simply secondhand information –– likely valuable if it came from a trustworthy source, but not absolutely. 

And even once something makes it into my mental "I know this" file, I still don't necessarily shout it right out for the world to hear. Instead, I let these things settle into my gut and grow smooth, like rocks at the bottom of a riverbed. 

No one knows they're there, but they still serve a sort of quiet purpose. They're anchors that keep me grounded in a saner version of the world where I always know what's real, even if no one else around me does. Silence doesn't make those things any less true. 

I know when someone is trying to manage me with compliments. I know when they’re dancing a stilted jig around the perimeter of a truth they don’t want to articulate. I know when someone's surprised (and more than a little bothered) that I don't fit comfortably into whatever labeled box they've decided to place me in. 

I register these things before I smile and say something polite –– not because I feel polite, but because I know it's expected of me and need to buy time while I wait for the next conversational exit. 

I know what it feels like to walk into a room and read the people in it before a single word is said. The tone of the air, the undercurrents of tension and the way tension always smells like carrots. Perhaps even unspoken resentment. I used to think everyone did this –– figured out the lay of the land before deciding how to proceed by scanning the energy in question. But then I realized almost no one does, except other people who simply don't mention it. 

I also learned that some people hate that this is something I can (and will) do. They don't think they should have to pass a vibe check before I'll interact with them.

I know what burnout feels like, not just physically but spiritually — the ache of having too many people need things from you while you’re scraping the bottom of your own well. I know the hollow feeling that comes when you're doing something that should be heartfelt out of obligation instead of devotion. 

On Wandering Back (and Wandering Pens)

I've been thinking a lot about this particular blog space lately. I'm in the process of my latest evolutionary stage as a writer (and when am I not evolving along with everything else on the Internet). 

I have a dedicated space for pretty much everything else now – my professional insights, my copywriting samples, my artwork, my monetized essays, and so forth. But I still find myself without a place to write publicly that's just... personal. A place where I write about myself and share all my random meta thoughts about creativity that don't quite go anywhere else. 

Do people even do that online anymore? I'm not sure I even know anymore. 

As a professional copywriter and content creator, I do know what people do when they want to create helpful, business-facing content. But where do they go when they just want to scream into the void in a way that's a little more polished and planned than they would do if they were just writing in their personal journal? Who knows. But I kind of like the idea of finding out. 

At any rate, it felt like it was time to check in here and lay the first brick of a foundation I think will be good for me moving forward, both as a writer and an individual. Eventually, those who like the way I think can come here and follow along if they feel moved to. In the meantime...

On the End of NaNoWriMo

I read recently that National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is officially no more, at least as a yearly event. It's been a while since I was hardcore into participating every year, but NaNo has still played a huge role in my development as a writer over the years. For starters, it taught me how to set and stick to personal deadlines. 

NaNo made me realize just how much you really can accomplish when you set your mind to it, as well, even if you're crazy busy. Even when you're sick to death of your project and really don't know where to go with it next. It's been part of my life for something like 20 years now. I haven't participated every year the way some people have, but it's been nice to know that it was there for me to go back to if I ever needed it.