You bought the journal, chose the pen that makes a small pleasure of the downstroke, and sat down full of real hope. Then you did the single thing most likely to strangle all of it. You compared.

Somewhere above the page sits a panel you never invited to the table. They arrived on their own. There is the writer whose tenth book you have read, marking your first shaky lines against her twenty years. Beside her sits the version of yourself you think you should already be, arms folded, unimpressed. The pen slows. Your hope thins. Within a paragraph the page has stopped being yours and become a performance for judges who were never real.

I know this panel intimately, because mine used to convene every morning before the house woke. In the dark I would open the notebook, and before a single true sentence made it out, the marking began. Not good enough. Who do you think you are. The cold coffee went colder while I argued with people who existed only in my own skull.

Here is what I wish someone had told me sooner. The panel is not measuring your writing. Look closely and you will catch them leaning back, marking you before your pen has touched the page, because none of them ever came to read. It is measuring you against an audience you built from your own fears, and that kind of audience will always vote the way the fear wants. That is its entire function. The panel exists to keep you safely unwritten, because an unwritten life cannot be judged, and it has confused safety with kindness.

So let me say this plainly. You are allowed to fire them.

For years you have tried to reason with this panel. Reasoning keeps them seated. Firing them ends the meeting. So clear the table. The page was never an audition. You owe a performance to no one, least of all a jury that let itself into a room that belongs to you.

What is left when they go is quieter than you expect. Just you and the honest scratch of a pen that does not care whether the sentence is worthy, only whether it is true. In that quiet there is exactly one comparison worth making, and it has nothing to do with the woman and her ten books. It is you, today, against you yesterday, last month, last year. That line moves. Watch it, and you will find it is the only scoreboard that ever told you anything real.

So this is your permission slip, and you may keep it. Tomorrow, open the journal in whatever dark hour is yours. Before the panel can take their seats, write one true line at the top: This page is mine, and no one grades it. Then keep your hand moving, honest rather than impressive. Your nervous system believes what you write in detail, so write, in detail, as the one who has already fired the panel and kept the pen.

The panel will knock again; they always do; however you do not have to open the door.

With love and courage from the in-between,

Magdalena

P.S: I am curious about you. Who sits on your panel? The writer with the ten books, the mother, the teacher who graded you in red, the version of you who was supposed to have done this by now, or (be honest) the one who has been there so long you stopped noticing the chair. Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

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Courage to Create

The panel of judges I never invited