Disclaimer: if you’d like to listen to me read this post to you, click the audio above.
Dear Readers,
The way that God will whisper to you the proper reminders regarding the hardships of your life’s current chapter, and use people to do so.
Sighhhhh.
…Usher spoke to me.
YES. Usher, our generation’s King of Pop/R&B, you read that correctly. I didn’t stutter.
I was minding my business, scrolling on Twitter for the first time that morning when a snippet from an interview he had done with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe came into view. Zane had asked him what was Usher’s secret to his longevity.
This is what he said:
“Stay focused on the work and not the stress. Something about this journey has been about never arriving. The journey is the destination. Being willing and understanding to whatever you have to go through.”
…it took me a minute to realize that moments previously, it was announced that Usher was OFFICIALLY slated to perform at the Super Bowl Halftime Show early next year.
I couldn’t help but smile and replay this video over and over again. It wasn’t just what he said, but it was the way he rested in his words with a smile on HIS face. This secret we’re always searching for, the thing that’ll give us the shortcuts to avoid all the pain and struggle and confusion and heartbreak of this life, he found beauty, refuge, and confidence in. The wisdom in the truth is that even when you think you’ve landed, there is a new journey to embark on. New gas to put in the car. A new road to drive through.
I don’t know if I’ve told you this. But, one of the greatest gems God gave to me about two years ago was that I was too worried about being the noun and not enough about doing the verb (…to be fair, Austin Kleon said this exact phrase, but God spoke in a different way eons before me reading such a blatant quote). I wanted to be a storyteller, a writer specifically. But, I wasn’t prepared for what that would entail. I wasn’t training. I wasn’t consistent. I remember him whispering that to me one night when I sat at my computer desk, racking my brains for the motivation to write.
“How can you be the writer you are meant to be if you are too afraid of the page?”
It was true. You’ll want something so bad and completely forgo everything it WILL take to be it. The title sounds nice; keeps you warm at night. But the responsibility of the title? Stays tucked away under the bed. We treat the journey like a monster out to get us, all because it’ll be painful. Because we’re afraid to not be perfect to ourselves. So we don’t make the necessary efforts to build the strength and just… wish it’ll happen the way we want it without doing much to learn how to even hold the rewards of the gifts.
…it’s kind of selfish. And me saying that doesn’t have to make you anxious.
We are all selfish with our purpose. Negligent, afraid, passive, whatever. It happens. But we have to be aware of it, at the very least, to do better.
Sometimes, God will use my own voice to speak to me. Like a person talking to their reflection. Like I’m sitting right across from myself. It’s pretty cool, actually. It’s most times my future self, the one I want to be, and she visits whenever I need a deep intervention. Remember a few posts ago when I said God comes, says what He has to say, and dips? My future self stays behind to be a little more elaborate.
I like elaboration. I’m a word lover, after all.
I remember when she took her time to explain what He meant: “In order to be a writer, you have to be willing to face your imperfection with writing. What, you’re afraid to burst your own bubble? You’ve idealized yourself so much, that you’re afraid that if you start writing and it’s not good, you may not be the writer you think you are. That you may be terrible? …so what? So. What? You might be terrible. But at least you know and there’s only up from here. You have the opportunity to get better. Now granted, you have too much evidence that you’re not terrible. But… you DO need practice. You do need expansion, speed, and strength to keep going. In a relationship, you cannot abandon your partner when it gets hard. Meet your gift halfway. That’s the only way to get over the fear of the journey.”
Meet my gift halfway.
It took me a lot of moments like this, where I spoke with myself about that. Because it’s humbling. You realize that NOTHING is holding you back from your dream/purpose more than the fear of the journey. The steps, mostly long ones, that it’ll take to feel a sort of sustainable confidence that can propel you forward. We want to INSTANTLY reap the fruits of our “labor” without laboring productively. And I will be clear here, we all struggle. The struggle is not new and it is not avoidable. There are levels to what the fight looks like, but to every person, the battle is unique and specific to what their journey needs at that time and place. We can look to the left and right and compare/contrast why this struggle and that struggle and why them and not me and blah blah blah, but we don’t even consider that the other person must have struggled in their own way and time, from a vantage point we stand at that we’d NEVER understand. Because it’s not for us to.
We can seek help to get through the struggle, but it’s still ours. And, while some parts of that journey will deeply shatter us into a fragment of pieces we have to be rebuilt from again, it’s all for something.
I have spent the past two years since that conversation trying to understand why I’m so afraid of the page, and why my obsession with perfection is unique specifically to me. Granted, I know many writers who feel what I feel, but there are MOMENTS in our lives that stamp that feeling deep in the pits of our spirits, and they’re all different. For me, personally, I think it was grad school. I went in seeking refinement and discipline, and I came out feeling frazzled, unfinished, and insecure. Granted, I don’t think it’s the job of grad school to finish you. I think it’s meant to introduce you to a part of yourself that needs a little preparation to conquer this next life. Except, I felt even more unprepared for what life could offer.
And I’m trying to comb through it, still. Trying to dig for more information. But ultimately, knowing that and the specificities of what grad school did to my writing is enough. Because my present is the evidence of a fear that looms over my back every time I hover my hands over the keyboard.
It’s why I started becoming consistent with my newsletter. I wanted the practice of consistency. I wanted to find comfort in writing again, pushing myself even if my brain tells me the post is gonna be trash, or that I have nothing good to say this week. It’s why, as I prepare for my next life in my career as a storyteller, I know that I have to get back to the basics of my creativity, but this time, build a structure that my work life has taught me and that my creative life needs. It’s not the destination of being a writer that I have to worry about. It’s whether I’m ready to embark on something that will be PAINFUL. Scary. Grueling. Leave me wheezing on the floor. Make me question who I want to be to get close to who I HAVE to be.
The journey is not the monster under our beds, the fear is.
The journey wants us to be great, and fear wants us to be stagnant.
The journey wants to show us some beautiful things, fear doesn’t know what that even looks like.
My life, up to this point, took guts, patience, and curiosity. This journey I’ve been on has been… pretty phenomenal, even when it was ugly. I can look back at the ugly and smile. Because look at where it brought me. 25-year-old Cyn couldn’t have even dreamed my current life up.
That’s what I saw in Usher. He smiled, and maybe for a millisecond, he caught wind of everything that brought him here. And that is how he maintained longevity, in his art and his gifts and his joy and his life:
“Something about this journey has been about never arriving. The journey is the destination.”
Love,
Cyn
The art featured in this post is by Zandile Tshabalala, included in her first solo exhibition titled, ‘Lovers In A Secret Place’, which debuted in Johannesburg, 2022.
the beauty of never arriving.