I Write for who?

I was checking out some online poetry today to get some motivation and I got pulled into some pieces by the incredible Narubi Selah. She's a wordsmith among wordsmiths. The piece in particular that spoke to me was "I Don't Write For You". Now the piece is dope. You should really check it out on Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDfemKdUs30 I thought about this piece...turned it over in my head and really, I have to admit that most poetry is selfish. It's selfish in the way of most art. As an artist we write about our experiences and opinions. There is a lot of "I" and "Me" in poems. I discovered that about most things that I write. I was once under the false impression that because all of these poems centered around me and around my experiences, they don't mean anything to anyone else and they are for just me. That isn't always the case. Poetry is extremely cathartic for me. It reveals some things harboring in my psyche that I've either refused to deal with or did not have the tools to deal with at the time that they occurred (incidentally, I still don't think that I'm equipped to deal with some of the issues that crop up. I've been in the middle of pieces and my pen stops - or fingers stop typing- because I've hit a place that is going to take me deeper into an abyss in my soul than I am prepared to dive. My oxygen tanks aren't that full and I don't have enough provisions to survive there so I stop.) We block ourselves - either consciously or subconsciously - from writing in order to protect ourselves. At any rate, I'm saying that things get personal and ish gets real. I discovered, however, that I am not special. I am not so great and so singularly important that God chose me and me alone to go through certain experiences. Sometimes my story isn't my story. It's the collective story of millions of women; of millions of little girls; of millions of frustrated artists stuck in the grinding wheels of corporate america; of millions of single mothers; of millions of mothers or special needs children; of millions of black women struggling with medical tragedies...I'm just one artist who has been blessed to put my experiences on paper. I'm one artist of many. So I cannot, in truth, say that I don't write for you. Perhaps, on some level, I do. If you were a little girl who was raped daily for years. I write for you. If you, then, introverted yourself and set out to make yourself as un-feminine and un-lovable as you possibly could so that no other man would ever touch you that way again, then I write for you. If the loneliness of that existence broke you even more so you decided to sacrifice your body to any man who wanted it to make yourself feel loved and needed, then I write for you. if you struggle with self-worth and single motherhood, and bills, and therapists and a job you hate..then I write for you and you and you. I thought I wrote for myself and I do, but this isn't just my life. I realize that if it were not for a songwriter, musician, pastor, poet, writer, artists, I would not be alive. I would not know that there is life after my tragedies. I would have never known that I could survive and still flourish after the things I've been through. As self important as it seems to some people, SOMEBODY needs my words. Somebody needs to read or or hear my music; my poetry; my words. They need it to survive. Last night a DJ saved my life. Really, last year a songwriter saved my life, by writing his truth, singing his truth and releasing his truth so that a DJ could play his truth in a place where I could hear my truth in his song. We are a complex myriad of consciousness in symbiotic relationship with one other. Something greater works in us and through us to heal our wounds individually AND collectively. I am my brother's keeper. I need you to survive. No man is an island. it takes a village....ALL of those things we repeat until they become cliche' are true. Sometimes my truth is OUR truth because it springs from from THE TRUTH; THE TRUE AND LIVING. THE I AM. So when I say "i"..sometimes it's "I" and is born from "I AM". anywho...that's my morning rambling. Be Beautiful today on purpose.