This article won’t be for everyone. It’s for those of you whose Resistance keeps you quiet when you ought to raise your voice and let out a battle cry.
Everyone has come across those quotes that insist that nothing is original and everything novel has already been said or done. At some point in my life I managed to internalize this and take it a step further. I was crushed by thinking, “Nothing I think really matters.”
I’m sure I wasn’t alone in drawing this conclusion. And yet despite this hopeless thought, some of us are eager and hold on, searching for a moment when we’ll finally have a novel idea to express. Others surge into the swamp of self-doubt. But regardless of which group we find ourselves in, this is silly. Be they novel or not, popular or unpopular, our thoughts should be expressed loudly and shamelessly. Originality isn’t the goal: the expression of the unexpressed is.