The thing you are most afraid to write

This quote by Nayyirah Waheed haunts me nearly every day:

“The thing you are most
afraid to write

Write that.”

Sometimes it’s the usual fears. What if this goes nowhere? What if I say something stupid? What if people don’t read it? What if they do read it?

But the usual fears aren’t paralyzing. I can read an author who inspires me and tell myself stories about how if I don’t keep trying I’ll never reach that level, and isn’t this what I’ve wanted to do with my life so long I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing?

Then there are the fears authors talk about in humble-brag: what if I get slammed on Goodreads? What if my parents read the spicy scenes when they buy my novel? What if my friends think the story is about them (which it kind of is, but we’ll pretend that characters are deeply fictionalized amalgams of real people)

These fears too are surmountable. Especially when you realize that simply by virtue of having a gift for articulation, you have power. If you get published, and people react strongly to your words, you’ve forced them to reckon with something: a point of view, a world, a funhouse mirror of themselves. And that was the point, after all.

But the fears that run deeper, so deep you mire yourself in all the simpler fears, what of those? I’ve struggled to write anything on social media about the protests in Iran, not because I am afraid of consequences, but because to write is to reopen old wounds, to remember things I’d need more than a weekend to put away afterwards. When I wrote Driving by Starlight, I had to dig deep into what it felt like to be a woman in a world where even public existence was a crime. It took months, years, to get even close to the truth of that lived experience.

In a way, writing that novel was a way of being done with those fears. A catharsis. How much more can I say about it?

But that’s an excuse too. There is always more. Always deeper than the fear, and the rage and even the grief over what it means to love a place that does not love you back.

So yes, that which I am most afraid to write. I must write that. If only because they would not want me to raise my voice. To draw attention to myself, or people like me.

But I’ll keep a hot chocolate at the ready for afterwards.

Below: billboard in Iran, 2011.