god, let my words outlive me

because what if the only thing I ever needed was to be remembered for the way I felt everything too hard?

I think about being a great writer quite often. I fantasize about becoming one of the greats—being known for my word-weaving, for the way I can take people on adventures inside their own imaginations and leave them breathless. And yet, I sit down, read back some of my own work, and think, "Damn, this is fucking shit. Who am I kidding?"

Who am I kidding, really?

There’s something rare and aching and golden about what I’m doing here on Substack—what many of us are doing, but I’ll be selfish right now and talk about me. Writing is pure. It’s holy. It’s healing. But sometimes I’m scared we’ve become a nation that’s forgotten the fragrance of true wordsmithing, the slow seduction of story-making, the intimacy of language that drips like honey from the page. I want to understand myself through the words I spill. I want to know the marrow of my own bones.

Sometimes, when I try to measure myself against the writers I admire, I wonder: Is my writing enough? Am I evoking emotion? Are people feeling me? Do they feel the words as I do—as pulses and flames and echoes in the gut? Do they recognize the soul behind the syntax, the one that’s aching to burst through the door unannounced and still be accepted?

Where do I go from here? Where does this writing go? Is it enough for Substack? Is it enough for the world? Or do I need to be more…more polished, more strategic, more bite-sized? I don’t know. I truly don’t. If my writing is evocative but not marketable, is it enough? Am I enough? Will I ever be?

Do I make the cut to be a writer? Could I sit beside Sylvia Plath? Her words wrecked me, shook me, and made me feel seen in ways I was too scared to ask for. Could I stand beside the other greats, even the ones who went unnoticed until after death? Do I have to die to be heard? Do I have to leave this earth before I’m seen?

Hello? Are you fucking there?

Come see me. Come hear me. Come see my soul.

Because what’s about to explode isn’t just ambition—it’s my soul. It’s clawing at my throat, desperate to be let out. Every second I’m breathing, I’m writing—if not on paper, then in my mind, in my dreams, in my bloodstream. It feels divine sometimes, like God whispering a sacred language only I can hear and begging me to translate it. Writing is communion. Writing is church. Writing is me meeting every version of myself and letting them speak in tongues.

So does that make me a writer?

Has it always been this way? The words pressing at my skin, begging to be born? These stories, these sentences—they are part of me. They don’t go away. I can be walking down a street, watching a pigeon take flight, and suddenly the sentence appears: Kendra, write us down. Bring us to life.

Like ghosts. Like spirits. Like someone has trusted me with resurrection.

Am I a writer?

Will I ever reach the level I crave? The tours, the book deals, the rooms full of people who get it. The stage where I get to sit down and talk about what it means to be human. Because somewhere along the way, we forgot. We forgot how to just be. We forgot that the rollercoaster is the point—the oohs and ahhs and the blood-curdling screams that beg God to stop the ride. But the belt tightens, and the ride continues.

I still don’t know what “kind” of writer I am. Am I supposed to? Fuck. I hope I don’t sound like a self-pitying, tortured artist. Even though...maybe I am. Maybe I’m trying to justify my own spirals. But to be a writer, do I need a genre? A box? A brand? Or do I just keep going, hoping to stumble into clarity?

Maybe I never will. Maybe it’ll always be this haze. Maybe someone else has to name me before I can claim it.

But I do know this: I’m the kind of writer who has to let it out. I have to write it. I have to bleed it. I have to publish it, even if the only reader is me and the girl in the mirror. Or me and one soul who needs to hear it. The words can’t just stay locked in the notes app or die inside my laptop…they must live. As I am living.

So what is it?

What am I?

Will I ever reach the greatness I dreamed of as a kid, before fear taught me to shrink?

At the end of the day, I’m writing to be human.

Writing to breathe again. Writing to alchemize the pain. Writing to feel the joy. Writing to understand what it means to have a soul in a body that’s trying its best. Writing because this human experience is a piece of divine art, and I have no choice but to live it and then hit send.