My entire life has been filled with dreams of being a writer.

What do these dreams look like? Doing exactly what I’m doing right now.

Simply being heard on a page, on a screen.

I used to have much less trouble exposing my deeper thoughts, being vulnerable here on a page, where I can’t see peoples eyes to correct their judgements of me.

Recently I had my worst fears as a writer come true.

My mum read some pretty hurtful stuff I’d written about her.

The guilt poured out like treacle. I’d hurt her so deeply.  It seemed this love of mine, this form of expression was designed to inflict pain.

So I stopped again. Winding myself up into a little ball. Shutting the door to my creativity once again.

As a writer my life is my source of material.

This means that everyone in it is vulnerable too.

Which… when I was younger was fine, I didn’t care.

The people I wrote about back then (mostly young men with no idea they were the subjects of my tomes of expression) were often only in my life for short periods of time.

I didn’t give a flying fuck about if they found it, in fact it would have delighted me, I was so desperate to be heard.

Now I am an adult, I am married, I’m a high school teacher, I live in a very small community and my friends all have access to this website and well…the only people that do read my writing are people I know.

This leaves me feeling vulnerable.

I feel that everything I write must be true.

But the thing about me is that everything is true, until I write about it, move through the emotion or saga of drama and then it’s no big deal. Writing for me is my most powerful processing mechanism.

But being a writer means I leave a footprint and a often, a mess behind me.

The vulnerability extends to my ego image.

I want so desperately to be seen as someone that has it together, with full knowledge that no-one else does, my ego is hard to get past sometimes.

It says, ‘people will use what you write against you, they will paint a picture of you with your words and you will never escape it, you will be left unloved, unliked, unemployable’.

I guess where I’m at now is that I want to not care, even if this is true.

Because I have been separated from my true self, my writer self for what feels like a lifetime.

Simply because I am too afraid of being vulnerable.

So, I write this in hope that a gate might open in me.

That my experiences may once again be explored on a page.

It is not anyone but myself that I plead, ‘Mia, release me from this internal straight jacket, this fear of being exposed and ruined because of it.before we are both destroyed with madness, please.’