Anyone who writes will also know the sensation: the undertow of despair. Who reads? Do they read? The silence that follows each piece can feel heavier than any criticism, and the lack of reply begins to gnaw at the purpose. If there is no echo, who is the sentence for? Such questions lengthen the day and leave the hours heavy, airless, given over to overthinking, until detachment quietly takes hold.
And so I paused. Not because the work ceased to matter, or the words had abandoned me, but the mood to chase them had dissolved. The pause, once entered, was oddly welcoming — a chance to see, to hear, to listen. To recover the older satisfaction that writing is not a performance for others, but for the stubborn need within self to shape thought into language.
For, we do not write to be heard, we write to know we are still capable of speaking.