One Small Voice

In an email to a friend yesterday I mentioned that I have been writing this blog every single day for more than two years, or since December 2013.  This for me has done wonders to clarify my thinking and also to challenge me to live with greater integrity.  I sometimes wonder how many people really read my little screed and what kind of impact or influence that I am having, if any. 

Really when I think of myself these days I often wonder, who do you think you are, anyway?  Why would anyone want to listen to me and what could I possibly have to say to others that hasn't been said better and more eloquently elsewhere that could make even one shred of difference?  My qualifications for smallness are enormous.  I do not have a university degree, I live in relative poverty, I am underemployed in a line of work that by its very name stigmatizes me: mental health peer support worker.  I live in government subsidized social housing where a number of the tenants have mental health issues and all of us are poorer than church mice.  I have my own lived history of mental health issues from which I have thankfully recovered.  I am an undiscovered artist, an unknown, but for this blog, writer, and I suppose in my way an unsung hero, though really, Gentle Reader, isn't it rather tacky of me to toot my own horn?  I come from humble working class roots and I live in Canada, one of the more obscure, if envied and admired nations of the world.

I still write this blog because I need to be heard.  I want to be heard and I ought to be heard.  For the attention?  No way.  Because I feel called to do this?  Well, duh, yes.  Because I have something to say?  We all have something to say and each one of us has a unique voice, not simply for its content but because being our voice it is something that no one else can say in our place.  This is why I write this.  Every single day.

I like to think of the butterfly effect.  You know, that the butterfly flapping its wings somewhere in Brazil will eventually generate the conditions for a typhoon or hurricane elsewhere in the world.  I do not know what any one of my readers is going to do with what I write.  But if it happens to be something good, timely, inspired, helpful and could well be just that tiny little implement to help change the world for the better then, Yes, Gentle Reader, I am going to take the chance, I am going to risk ridicule and publish for the world to read my innermost thoughts and ponderings in the hope that you will read, ponder, meditate upon and inwardly digest and pass it on to someone who just might have the power, connections and influence to help change this poor sick and weary world that we all share together.