My Word

I was standing in front of the mirror trying to memorize my own words. The words were in the form of a poem I had written years ago but had never committed to memory.
A friend recently asked why, and I had no good answer. She wondered why you wouldn't memorize your own poem. After all, these are your words. They flowed from your mind.
That made sense and so here I stood, repeating lines and lines of my poem like a mantra. I recited them in a rhythm to some invisible beat in my head.
And slowly, I felt some power rise within me, some feeling I had never felt when I read this poem from paper.
The power came from a feeling that I owned the words I was speaking. The words weren't on paper anymore.
They were in me. They had always been in me. They were in me the moment I first wrote the poem so many years ago. And they remained in me as I fiddled with the words in order to capture perfectly what I wanted to say.
Not only are you owning your words, you are owning your truth, your voice, your right to say what you want to say and let it hang there for the world to absorb.
Take it or leave it, you say. But I will be heard.
One of my favorite movies of the last few years is "Book of Eli" starring Denzel Washington. (Forgive me but I'm about to spoil it for you if you haven't seen it). The movie takes place in an apocalyptic future where no one reads and books are rare. But Washington, a loner on some kind of weird righteous path, has a book, The Bible. An evil man played by Gary Oldman wants that book because he knows the power of the words contained in it.
At the end, Oldman gets the book, and when he opens it, there are no words. Washington is blind and he has memorized the entire Bible. The Word of God is in him, and no one can take that Word away from him.
Writers all their lives are chasing to find their voice. They dabble in the words of other writers, taking a little here and there, all the while trying to master who they are and what their truth is.
They're trying to find the words that will say who they are, the words that will synthesize their essence, encompass the experiences they had that made them who they are.
This is a long process that never really ends. But maybe it begins by owning the words you have written. Owning them and not apologizing for them. Owning them and yelling them out on the stage that is your life.
Only you can say what you say in the way that you say it. No one else can speak your words for you. And no one should try.