You’ve been doing this a long time.

Saving your thoughts for the moment you can sit down and put them to paper, knowing they’ll never sound the same way out loud as they will when the world reads them in their own heads.

Staring at a blank screen just long enough to lose a little sanity, and then somehow, transforming that empty space into a masterpiece.

Finding yourself thinking you’ll never stop feeling a certain way, then changing your mind the moment you finish writing it all out.

Believing words can change a life. That your words are important enough to make a difference.

You’ve been at it forever. Writing. Hoping. Dreaming. Writing some more.

Yet no matter how hard you work, no matter how deeply you dive into the stories you create, it never seems to be good enough.

No matter how many projects you take on, no matter how many people you connect with, you’re still just another name on a very long list of aspiring writers hoping for the same outcomes you are.

Whenever something moves you – sometimes, even when nothing does – you sit down and you write about it. You paint pictures with your words, sculpt and shape messages in ways you’re sure no one else ever has before.

You just want all that hard work, all that passion, all that determination, to mean something. To matter.

You just want to be heard.

You have a voice, powerful and refined and passionate. But no one seems to notice.

Nobody seems to care.

We have all been here. Every single one of us. Because here’s the thing about going after a goal: no one can say, for sure, if you’re ever going to achieve it.

It isn’t that you’re not good enough or strong enough or determined enough. It’s just … success, sometimes, doesn’t happen the way we think it will, or think it should.

You read your favorite authors’ books and you follow them on Twitter and you can picture in your mind the day when you will be as successful, as widely read, as well-known as they are.

But their degree of success, the level they have reached, is not a standard. There is no scientific law that says you will never be successful unless you touch the exact point where they are standing.

Your voice, your words, may never reach hundreds of thousands of people.

It may only ever reach one, or two, or 20.

But does that make all your hard work, your passion, your drive, any less worthy of praise?

Perhaps only one, or two, or 20, 0r 200, or 2,000 people will read your words. Out of a population of billions and billions of people, that number seems so small.

But you are still being heard. Someone out there is listening to you.

Don’t go silent just because the whole world has yet to recognize that you have things to say and points to make and hearts to mend and lives to change.

Because that one person, those two, 20, 200, 2,000 people, might be counting on you.

They are listening to you.

They think your words are amazing.

Never forget that you are doing this because you love it. Never forget that you are a writer because you cannot live without the relief of spilling ideas out onto a page and arranging them into stories that make sense, even if they only make sense to you.

Remember, in these moments when you feel lonely and discouraged and unheard, how writing makes you feel. How it makes you come alive inside, in a way you’re not sure anyone or anything else can.

Remember that without your words, the world would not make very much sense to you.

Keep writing them. Even if it seems like no one is listening.

You cannot see what the future holds. You cannot predict where this will lead.

Hold on. Write on. Because tomorrow, everything could change.

Image courtesy of Eva Peris/flickr.com.