The blank page
To the version of me who stared at a blank page,
You couldn’t write a paragraph without someone looking over your shoulder. You’d type a sentence, delete it, type it again. You needed your mother’s eyes on every word before you believed it was good enough. She always showed you the way. She’d sit with you, move a comma, fix a thought, and somehow make the page less scary.
Back then, writer’s block wasn’t just in your hands. It was in your throat. You couldn’t speak either. The words got stuck behind fear. You were an introvert by default, not by choice. Silence felt safer than being wrong, safer than being seen.
But silence didn’t get to keep you.
Little by little, you stopped asking for permission to write. You stopped waiting for someone else to tell you your words were okay. You wrote messy. You wrote scared. You wrote anyway. And each sentence taught you that your voice didn’t need an editor to be real.
The same thing happened when you started speaking. First it was a whisper at a bus stop. Then a story in a room full of people. Somewhere between the ashes and the butterfly, you stopped hiding.
Now you’re an extrovert on your own terms. Not loud for the sake of noise, but open because you finally trust what you have to say. You’re truly comfortable with yourself — the woman who once couldn’t finish a paragraph without help now writes letters to her past and speeches for her future.
So to the old me: Thank you for struggling. Thank you for needing your mother’s hand on the page. That’s where this voice started. You didn’t know it then, but writer’s block was just the cocoon. And look at you now.
You write. You speak. You belong to yourself.
– Cathryn, the one who found her words
