Diary Entries for the Soul: On Writing, Masks, and the Brakes We Learn to Release

Authenticity, I’ve come to believe, is when the gut, the heart, and the tongue find harmony. When what you feel, what you know, and what you say hum the same note. Rare music, that.

But I learned early how to wear masks—and how to wear them well. It was a survival skill. A business strategy. A way to protect profit margins in the boardroom, or to avoid being unsaddled by the wild flood of emotions I didn’t know how to hold. Useful, maybe. But costly. Over time, the mask bruises the soul from the inside out.

When Éliane first encouraged me to write—to really write—I smiled. I even grinned. But it wasn’t my whole face that responded. I was wearing one of my most convincing masks, one I’d sculpted carefully over years. It had a generous smile, a polished persona, and a mouth wide enough to say Hell Yes… even when my heart and gut were whispering Hell No.

I know that mask. I’ve spoken through it too many times.

And when she said go for it, all I could hear was you should.

I’ve always been allergic to shoulds. As a boy, they weighed heavy. Crushed me, even. “You should be more like this.” “You should have known better.” “You should succeed.” They built a kind of scaffolding around me—a structure that looked like ambition, but was really just fear in a tailored suit.

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The American writer Flannery O’Connor once responded to a student who asked, “Why do you write?” with a shrug: “Because I’m good at it.”

It’s tempting to divide the world this way—those who are “good” at writing and those who aren’t. The haves and have-nots of creative fluency. The perfect-eared and the tone-deaf. But Hell No.

Even Naheed Nenshi, the former mayor of Calgary, refused to play along with binary divides. He wore purple shirts, purple ties, purple socks—not as a fashion statement, but as an embodied refusal to choose between red and blue. Sometimes, wisdom wears lavender.

So I ask myself: Must I write?

When the young poet Franz Xaver Kappus sent his early work to Rainer Maria Rilke, seeking critique, Rilke didn’t edit. He didn’t even answer the question. Instead, he offered a meditation. “Go into yourself,” he wrote. “Search for the reason that bids you write... acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.”

Would I have to die?

No. Not literally.

But when Théo died—a young man in his late twenties, someone I was coaching weekly—something inside me cracked. One day he was alive, vibrant. The next, gone. No explanation. No autopsy. Just absence.

And then, after the shock softened into sorrow, my throat began to open. I wanted to say something. Anything. And soon after, my fingers itched. They needed the keyboard. There were no answers, just a quiet inner motion: Write.

Maybe that’s the point. Not to write because I “should.”

Not to write because I “must.”

But to write because my fingers are looking for the stream

—and maybe, this time, I’ll let them find it.

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I’ve spent a lifetime stepping on the gas. But when the blank page is the destination, my brakes lock tight—every flavor of resistance shows up. Sabotage. Delay. Doubt. Hesitation disguised as perfectionism. All of it.

But as 2023 faded into memory, I found myself scrolling through the clutter of Instagram. And between the noise and the numbness, something golden surfaced. The algorithm, for once, got it right.

Rick Rubin—legendary music producer, barefoot sage—started showing up in my feed. Again and again. His book The Creative Act: A Way of Being. His voice—calm, honest, unsellable—offered me a new permission slip.

He spoke of overcoming creative block by treating each act of expression as a diary entry. Nothing more. Nothing less. “If you’re making something just for yourself, that’s enough,” he said. “It’s a diary entry. And you can’t tell me my diary entry isn’t good enough.”

Those words sank in. They soothed something scorched inside me.

When we make something truly for ourselves,

paradoxically, we create what others need most.

So in this new year of 2024, here is my quiet commitment:

To write. Not to impress. Not to succeed.

But to create the mood of my days.

To find calm. Peace. Joy.

And maybe—just maybe—a sense of wholeness.

I will write diary entries for the soul.

Not because I “should.”

Not because I “must.”

But because I finally want to say

Hell Yes

with my gut,

my heart,

and my tongue—together.

So now, dear reader, if you feel the faintest itch in your fingers, the softest tug in your chest…

Try this:

What might your diary entry say today

if no one else would ever read it—

if it didn’t have to be profound, polished, or perfect—

if it only had to be honest?

Don’t wait for clarity. Or confidence.

Start with what’s cracked, or tender, or trembling.

Start with what your gut knows

but your tongue has been trained to silence.

And if all you can muster is a whisper,

let that be your truth today.

Because somewhere, beyond the noise and the “shoulds,”

your voice is still there.

Waiting.

Wanting.

Ready.

Write.

Just for you.

And see what returns.

Next: Epilogue: An Invitation to the Reader

© 2025 Dominique Bel. Cardboard Wings: A Constellation of Becoming. All rights reserved.