Falling Away

"Once I begin the act of writing, it all falls away -- the view from the window, the tools, the talismans, and I am unconscious of myself... one's carping inner critics are silenced for a time... there is always a surprise, a revelation. During the act of writing, I have told myself something that I didn't know I knew."                                                            ~ Gail Goodwin

I came across this quote today, and I felt the urge to share it. For isn't it the truth? Isn't that one of the great reasons that we writers write? To experience a falling away of the world and an inner revelation of self?
I come to know myself through writing. It answers the hard questions. Who am I? What do I truly believe? What morals do I stand by? Which acts can I justify? And how far would I really be willing to go to get what I want?

The world is full of people who would tell you what to believe. The media is constantly bombarding you with it's skewed idea of what is right and what is wrong. Books would try to sway you. Friends would try to make us understand. And that's fine. It's important to be open-minded. But we also need to decide for ourselves what we believe, what we want, who we are.

For me, this is what I discover when I write. Sometimes I don't even know until I get to the end of a piece. Until a core piece of me bleeds out onto the page. But when I see it there in black and white, it's always an "aha" moment. It's always an "Of course! How could I not have realized." It's an inner truth. A seed that was germinating somewhere deep inside us, just waiting to be brought out into the light. Or as Gail Goodwin called it, "a revelation."

What is your writing trying to tell you about yourself?