One of my biggest issues with writing involves the seeming pointlessness of the activity. In the face of any kind of iniquity, you write and you write and you write and you write... and absolutely nothing happens.

Words are often lost in the sea of competing essays, journals, reports blogs and other correspondence. Words, when they are noticed at all, are dismissed as just words: inconvenient, ineffectual and ultimately irrelevant to the lives of the people who can best benefit from them or act on them.

No one has the time to read, much less to think about the message that you've been killing yourself to simplify and condense into hundred-word chunks. Life is so crammed with other affairs that must be prioritized that anything longer is lost.

There is a fire in your belly but it sputters well before you touch ink to paper. Because you know-- even in the face of proof that writing moves mountains, inspires people, kindles love-- that your own writing is just not powerful enough to do those things for you.

Writing is an act of magic. Concepts flow from mind to hand to paper and they stay there, perpetually imparting those concepts to any who will bother to read. Writing too is an act of faith. You write in the hope that someone will take that bottle you tossed into the sea, that she will open it and appreciate the message inside. It rarely happens.

That little part of you that believes in fairy tales-- the part you savagely repress when life offers you the choice between expediency and trust-- it refuses to die, to shut up in the face of the reality you've grown old with. It kicks at your shins and tugs at your sleeve like a disconsolate little boy. Like an exasperated parent you are torn between holding him to your breast and smacking him in the mouth.

You have a reason to write. The little boy in you pleads for you to make one more leap of faith. Knowing that you follow a narrative retold countless times, you touch ink to paper anyway. You know it's against your nature, but you promise yourself that once the essay is predictably dismissed, ignored or forgotten, you will never write another word again.