It's Time to Come Clean ...

About The Real Reason I've Waited 40 Years to Finish the Novels

NOTE: I recorded this audio update for my patrons on Patreon this past Sunday. It’s far more raw and personal than I normally share in public, but I wanted to share it publicly here too. I owe it to all my readers to share the truth about my experience as a writer, and especially those of you who’ve been following my multi-decade quest to complete The Pearlsong Refounding novels. Your patience has been next level, and I really don’t know how to convey how much it means to me. Thank you. The text below is a lightly-edited version of what’s on the audio, but the meat of it is all there.

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Hello friends and fellow seekers of the Good True Beautiful, It's Mike here … And guys, I am on the final chapter of the final book in The Pearlsong Refounding. Wow! It has taken forty years to get here. 

Forty freakin’ years. 

And I gotta to say — I mean, I'm excited, of course. Very excited to finally be at this stage. But, also, I will say that over these final weeks of writing, I've been having so many feels. It’s been wild. I've really come up against what I would say is the root cause, the fundamental fear behind why it has taken forty years for me to get to this point. Unsurprisingly, this fear, which has kept me from finishing the books for years, has reared its head in full force as I've come toward the final pages. Thankfully, I've been able to process through a lot of it, and while I'm still processing through it, it has not prevented me from writing. I'm really glad for that. If all goes well this week, I should be finishing up the final book by the weekend. 

I am really looking forward to that! 

But I want to open up with you today about this fear. 

This is personal for me. It's vulnerable for me. But I want to share it because I know I'm not the only one who has this struggle. And I hope by me talking about my own struggle with this, maybe it might be an encouragement for you as well. 

So, I guess I'll start here. It’s a weird place to start, but go with me: 

Every week I get a report from my email list telling me who has unsubscribed. Every time I send a newsletter out, just like clockwork, I will get a report two days later, and I will have somewhere between two and five (sometimes it's up to eight) people who unsubscribe from the newsletter. I see their names and their email addresses. And I know this is kind of normal. It’s not that unusual for people to do that. But the last couple of weeks in particular, they have been people I know. They have been people that I consider friends of mine that I've been connected with for many years. 

And I can't help it. When I see their names, I get this sinking sense of hurt and loss. I know that's hypersensitive, and I feel bad even admitting it because I get that it’s hypersensitive. I mean, people are busy and they can't read every newsletter out there and they're probably just trying to clear out their inbox. It's not that big of a deal. But at the same time, it plays into this narrative that I have in my life. It’s a persistent longstanding message that goes like this:

My voice doesn't matter. 

Actually, I have two narratives concerning my voice. And when I say my “voice,” I mean not just my physical voice, but also my writing, and anything that I produce in a public way, whether it's Braveheart-related or a coaching course, or an article or essay or novel or poem — really, any creative way that I offer what I have to the world. 

So I have these two competing narratives, and they come from conflicting messages I have received consistently throughout my life. 

One of the narratives is very positive. It goes like this: Oh my goodness, you have such wonderful things to say. I value the way you think. I love the way you write, the way you speak, and the things that you offer. Your voice can be really transformative for people. It's very helpful for people. I love what you bring, and I want more of it. Please bring more of it. 

To be clear, I don't let that narrative go to my head. I understand that it's not about me. It's more about how God might be able to use me as an instrument in certain ways that are useful for people. But it's a positive narrative all the same. It’s a narrative that says, “Yeah, your voice is needed. Your voice is wanted. Your voice does good in the world.”

But then, there's this other narrative that is very much the opposite. It goes like this: Your voice doesn't matter. Nobody wants to hear from you. Everything you say is weird and nobody wants to really listen to it. People, at best, are tolerating you; and, at worst, they are actively trying to avoid you. 

I have a fair bit of evidence that supports this negative narrative, starting with my parents. I grew up in a house where my voice wasn't invited. It wasn't listened to and wasn't encouraged. And in my adult life, I’ve had experience after experience of creating something that I believed was really wonderful, and putting it out in the world, and then nobody really being that interested in it. It’s often felt like singing a song I wrote on a stage and getting crickets in response. 

Throughout my life, these two narratives have always been in a wrestling match in my head and in my heart. It’s been a constant back and forth. Yes, bring your voice! No, why bother bringing your voice? 

Back and forth. Back and forth.

It drives me nuts.

So, every time I get this weekly subscriber report that tells me, “Oh, this person that that you did all this stuff with for this many years has unsubscribed from your newsletter,” it’s a little more fuel on the “your voice doesn't matter” fire. And I know (I don't really need you guys to tell me this) that it’s very unlikely that the people unsubscribing are trying to send me that message. They probably have no idea that that's even a message that I'm getting. 

This is not about people unsubscribing from the newsletter. This is about my internalized narrative around it. 

Also, I've had these cycles of humiliation that have occurred over and over again where I've worked hard to put something out in the world, to have it grow, to build it up. But, it just doesn’t. I mean, sometimes at first, it kind of does. But then it really doesn't. And I’ve found that getting people to promote things that I have produced has been really difficult to do. So I just keep having this conflict inside. I get people telling me that the stuff I create is good, but then I don't see people promoting it to other people. I don't see people talking about it with anybody else. So, I don't know. It’s very confusing, you know, to know how to interpret that. 

All that to say, I end up in this place of fear around my voice, around my writing, and my work in the world. I want what I'm doing to actually matter, to have some impact in the world. And I get afraid that it doesn't. So then I find myself craving feedback or recognition or assurance. Essentially, I want some kind of reassurance that I'm not nuts, that I'm not just blowing smoke, that I'm not self-deluded, basically, doing something that isn't really useful, and people are just tolerating it. 

Now, I have to imagine that I'm not the only person who feels that way about something you feel called to do, or about some gift that you feel like is in you to bring to the world. There's this battle inside you around the question of “Why bother doing this?” And a voice that says no one's going to care about it, or no one wants to hear it, or no one wants to see it, or nobody's going to support it. 

So often we tend to cut things off at the knees that are inside our own hearts because we preemptively believe they're not going to matter to anybody else. 

So we just don't bring them to the world. 

And that is actually the primary reason that I have taken so long to finish these novels. 

I have been afraid that they won’t matter to anybody else. 

Of course, there have been circumstantial reasons why the novels have taken so long, and those are legitimate reasons. But underneath all that, there has been this longstanding fear that I'm going to finish this series, with all this sound and fury, and it's going to go out into the world and just kind of peter out. Nothing's going to happen. The impact is just going to be sort of empty. 

I don't mean that I need these books to be New York Times bestsellers or anything. The fear is that they won’t have a meaningful ripple effect in people’s lives. If that happened, it would reinforce the negative narrative in a really big way:  

“Yeah. Your voice doesn't matter. And this really, really proves it. I mean, you've done this monumentally huge project that matters very deeply to you. And nobody, relatively speaking, a very small percentage of people actually even know it exists or care. And those that do know it exists are not sharing it with anybody else. Nobody’s spreading the word, so nobody else knows about it. So, that proves it. Your voice doesn't matter. Nobody wants to hear what you have to say.”

The truth is, the novels have taken all this time because I've found it easier emotionally to just not finish them than to face the possibility that they might not make any impact at all…that the negative narrative in my head might be the one that wins.

Now that I am finally finishing the novels, I've had to really confront that negative narrative, to really look at it square in the face. What stands out to me is that it’s really sad. It’s a very hard narrative to carry. I feel sad knowing this has been resting on my shoulders all these years, that I've carried this weight around that’s directly connected to something I enjoy. Because, to be clear, the writing of these books has been a complete joy to me. I love it, and yet there's been this sort of albatross hanging around my neck about it at the same time.

So I want to share a few things that have become clearer to me in the last couple of weeks. I share them as someone who's in the middle of the journey, obviously. I'm going to be integrating these things into my life over the next several months. But I want to share them as a way to maybe encourage you. 

Because I'd wager there might be something inside you that kind of fits in this category. Something that may not be a book. It might be a painting. It might be a business. It might be some other kind of project. It might be a garden, or a trip you’ve never taken. It could be anything that you feel like is in you that you want to do, but you have talked yourself out of it, or you've procrastinated and put it off because there's some narrative inside you that says it's either unwanted or it's not going to matter or nobody's going to care, and so why bother? 

So one of the things that I have come to realize is that I've been worrying a lot in this whole process about God's providence. You know, like, is God providentially going to use these novels in some way? And I had to, in essence, repent of that because Providence is not my job. It’s God's job. Impact is not my job. How the art I create impacts the world is not in my job description. It's not part of what I'm supposed to be responsible for. 

Yet I have self-edited my voice because I preemptively said, “This isn't going to have an impact, or it's not going to have the impact that I want it to have. So I will providentially shut it down.” 

But I have realized that by doing that, I have put myself in God's shoes. 

When I do that, I put myself in God's place of “being God” over whether something should happen or shouldn't happen, and what its impact is or isn't going to be. 

But it’s not my job to predict what providentially is going to happen. It's not my job to be in control of the impact of things. 

What is my job is to listen to the voice of God's Spirit within me and to follow that voice. And to do my best, my absolute best, to bring what I have, which means my voice, to the world. And to bring it as skillfully and as masterfully as I can. 

That's it. 

It's simple. 

It's not easy, though. In fact, it's quite hard. 

Because to do that, I have to pay attention to what is happening in that alchemical interaction between me and the Holy Spirit in my own soul, and to recognize what is wanting to be expressed through me for the sake of the world … or, maybe just for the sake of my own worship to God, or for the sake of my own expression of love for life or for other people, and then to bring that to the world, to enact that vision, to make it real, and to do it as skillfully and masterfully as I can. 

That’s hard to do because no one else would know if you're not doing it.

If I never wrote these novels, no one would have a clue that I was meant to.

It's a private exchange between you and the Divine. 

I think it's easy to do what you feel called to do when the world is clapping en mass and cheering you on; like, when you start to take some little step, and then everyone and everything around you exclaims “Oh my God, this is fantastic! Please keep going!” You just hear all these cheers. So you start going bigger. I think it's easy to keep doing it when that happens. (Then, of course, you run the risk of doing it for people’s applause rather than for the reason you started it.)

But I think it's not so easy to do when you feel like you're playing a solo and you're not sure anyone is really listening or interested, or if they are listening, they're listening out of pity, or because they’re friends and family of yours and they feel obligated to listen. 

I think it's hard to bring your gift to the world when that's your experience. 

But I just want to say that at the end of the day, whether the gift you bring is bringing you applause, or humiliation, or the silence of apathy — that none of that matters. 

None of that matters. 

What matters is that you stay faithful to the Divine track of your own life. 

There's never been a YOU before. In the great orchestra of God's creation, you are an instrument that has never happened before. Whether you realize it or not, you are in a symphony, right in the middle of the flow of this wonderful arrangement God is playing in the universe. But your particular instrument has never been a part of that symphony until now. 

I would argue — no, I assert — that you owe it to your Creator to sing the song he has made you to sing, to play the song he has made you to play … even if nobody hears it, or if it doesn't seem to make any difference to anybody. 

Because it makes a difference to God. 

And it makes a difference to you. 

And that is more than enough. 

That is more than enough reason to do it. 

But I'll even take it one step further. There are also all the saints who've gone before you. That great “cloud of witnesses” watching from heaven, cheering you on. I believe they want to see what you have to bring as well. I believe they want to hear your song. They want to know what your voice sounds like when you really set it free. 

So, don't hide. 

Don't hide. 

Don't do what I did and wait forty years to finish the book. Or paint the painting, or start the business, or chase the dream, or do the thing that you're supposed to do because you're scared it won't matter, and it's easier to not do it than to face the possibility of nobody caring. 

Because at least two people will always care: you and God, and that is more than enough reason to do it. 

So that's what's come to me as I've been wrestling through my own fear around finishing the novels. 

I hope it helps.

I'm excited this week to get to the last word, on the last page. To put a period at the end of the sentence, and to write: THE END.  

So yeah, wish me well in that process. Pray for me that I stick the landing well. 

And, whatever your dream is: Stop hiding, and do it.