Photo credit: Flickr: Shelby H.
Originally appeared on Medium, July 2018
I have this irrational fear that there is only a finite number of combinations of words and letters. That at some point, the world of language will reach this bleak, nihilistic tipping point at which no one will ever be able to write a sentence that someone else hasn’t already written.
I’m not a statistician —numbers make my eyes glaze over in seconds flat — so I don’t actually know how irrational this fear really is. Maybe I should hire someone to look into it so I can sleep at night.
While they may frame it differently, I think most writers — most artists of every variety — struggle with this fear. How do I create something new? How do I say something that hasn’t been said a million times before? Am I really an artist, or just a fraud?
It’s all been done before
I recently attended Mass with my best friend and her family. I’m a very lapsed Catholic. The only occasions for which I’ve stepped foot in a church in recent years have been weddings and funerals. But I was visiting her for the weekend, and I wanted to see the church where she’ll be getting married in a few months (it’s beautiful, by the way), so off I went.
It’s amazing how a Catholic upbringing sticks with you. I found myself mouthing along the words to prayers and songs I haven’t recited in over a decade. I also instantly recognized the Gospel reading for the day.
As I listened to the priest’s voice wash over the congregation, I started thinking about the Catholic liturgy. Mainly how it never changes. Every year or two, the liturgical calendar will cycle through the same books of the New Testament. They’re not coming up with any new material here — everyone has heard these readings many, many times before.
And yet, for faithful Catholics, that doesn’t matter. The repetition does not diminish the meaning, the guidance, the spiritual nourishment these readings provide. Some years one reading will jump out at you, some years it will be another reading, depending on what’s going on in your life. You can hear them dozens of times before and still walk away having learned something new.
I started thinking that maybe the same is true of all writing, of all art. Maybe we need to stop worrying so much about saying something brand new, and focus more on making sure that the thoughts we’re harping away at are worthwhile.
The greatest themes bear repeating
Good versus evil. The redemptive power of love. The quest for immortality. These themes, and many others, repeat themselves over and over throughout literature. Sure, the stories themselves differ — Harry Potter versus, say, A Tale of Two Cities — but the underlying currents are the same.
And that’s because these themes are important. They speak to our shared humanity, to questions and fears and dreams that we all encounter at some point in our time on this spinning planet. So what if other people have written about these ideas time and time again? They need to be written about.
I’m far from the only person out there writing about self-love, personal development, writing and art. But I’m the only one doing it from my perspective, with my voice, with my own weird nuances and neuroses shining through.
I write these things because I’m compelled to — they’re within me, clawing and pleading to get out. I also write them because I believe, deeply, that all of our stories matter. That sharing our stories is how we lift each other up, assure each other that we’re not alone in this. That enough people simultaneously speaking words like “self-love”, “boundaries”, “mental illness”, “emotional intelligence”, and “eat your damn vegetables” can create a sea change.
So what if other people are writing about the same ideas? The more the merrier.