The More I Write...
From a half-joking moment of midair self-doubt, a reminder that mental health and creativity are inseparable.
I didn’t plan to write a poem that day, at least not one I’d keep.
Somewhere mid-flight, high above the clouds, I felt that scratchy, unmistakable itch to get something down. The notebook I had with me was full. My phone was out of battery. I was suspended above the ocean in a large metal tube with nothing to write on. So I did what any stubborn poet would do: I asked the flight attendant for some paper and a pen.
She came back with a kind of waxy tray-liner, usually placed under a plastic-tasting meal, and an almost-empty biro. It wasn’t designed for poetry, but who is?!
I got writing.
The first poem I wrote on it, Borrowed Paper, made it into Counterweights. Others on the page didn’t. Some were just thoughts. Marginalia, passing weirdnesses about the word “fart” or a little ditty about pants to amuse the friend I was travelling with. There are crossed-out lines, wonky word games, and a brutally honest reflection:
“The more I write, the more I realise… I’m pretty shit at it.”
That line didn’t make it into a book, either. But it stayed with me.
Because the truth is, that feeling never fully goes away. Not for most of us. There are days when I sit with a finished page and still wonder if I’ve said anything worth keeping. And yet, the act of writing at all is a kind of defiance. It takes effort to believe your own thoughts are worth putting on paper. It takes even more to keep going when they don’t come out clean or clever.
Self-worth is hard-fought. Especially when your art is stitched so tightly to your sense of self.
I’ve learned to be gentler with that voice. To let it speak, but not always believe it. That scribbled, self-deprecating line wasn’t the end of the thought, it was just a moment. One of many, on one strange piece of paper, written in mid-air by someone still figuring it out.
I love this page because it reminds me that writing doesn’t require the right tools or the perfect setting. Sometimes it’s just a moment that insists on being held. Sometimes the poem writes itself while you’re 35,000 feet above the mess of daily life.
The paper doesn't matter anywhere near as much as the words you're wrirting on it.
