It makes my heart smile when someone reads the words I pen and they resonate with them in some way. I feel blessed when they respond, when I realize the message I intended to convey came across as I’d hoped it would.

Often, I write to share a truth or an insight I’ve gleaned at some point in my life. If it taught me something, perhaps it can do the same for someone else, or at the very least, validate a truth of their own or set them on a path they may not have known was there.

There is something important I wish to impart when it comes to what I give to the page, I am not necessarily going through what I write of in the exact moment I write of it, sometimes, but not always.

A writer’s mind, at least my mind, does not completely maintain a foothold in the here and now. The ebb and flow of my stream of consciousness is forever churning and changing direction, my thoughts rushing in as raging rapids or as gently trickling droplets.

I can think a thought or experience a moment of epiphany about depression or anger or grief during the happiest of times, sometimes I share these thoughts because I still need to learn something from them or simply set in stone what has already been cultivated from the garden of my experience. I share these thoughts in the hope someone may need to hear what I have to say.

Writers can also be a wee bit melodramatic — I once wrote two agonizing pages about fear, anxiety, and what was lurking in the shadows just waiting to get me. In actuality, I was in the park on a sunny afternoon watching my children frolic, yes they frolicked, and when I looked down I noticed an eensy weensy spider coming toward me at a speed which made me slightly less than comfortable; it startled me. I went with it. I didn’t have any curds and whey, so I ran with the whole deepest, darkest fear thing.

There are times I write of lessons learned long ago and my words may convey a sense of the now, when in fact, I have long since moved past that moment. I do this for those who may need to hear it in the now and might relate. I do this because it is a part of my story, it is how I felt, who I am, and how I came to be.

Sometimes I find a few scribbled words scratched upon a crumpled piece of paper I’ve left between the pages of a book, something I once wanted to write, but somehow forgot about, and it all comes back to me, begging to be set free and given its say. I almost always oblige it.

I can travel my own timeline as a silent observer, I take notes and create a written history of the events, the feelings . . . I capture them and breathe life back into them so none of it is forgotten or experienced in vain.

Everything I write is a truth, it may be an old truth realized and finally made tangible in print. It may be something I hadn’t felt the need to share just yet, or perhaps I was simply waiting for the right words to find me.

Maybe those words were just waiting for the right person to share them with.

Crystal R. Cook