Sommer Duenow

I tend to think of myself as a goblin.

Not the chaotic internet kind, but the squishy sort that lives in a little green cave full of plants, books, and soft light, collecting interesting things and arranging them just so. A bit of driftwood here… a stack of notebooks there. 

I’ve built a world so wonderful, I genuinely don’t want to leave.

The outside world still exists, of course. Groceries need buying. Work persists. Kiddo needs to be driven places. The rhythm of ordinary life keeps moving, but the center of my thinking happens in this teeny tiny ecosystem I’ve built around me.

My Goblin Cave.

And if I’m honest, once you build a place like this, you don’t feel a strong urge to leave it very often. That part sounds idyllic, and it mostly is, but it comes with its own strange drawbacks. Because when doubt creeps in, a cave can become a very easy place to go silent. 

Not for a day.
Not for a week or two.

Sometimes for months. 

And for now, nearly a year.

It started with a community collapse. Then the last familial collapse. Then a string of smaller collapses that piled up the way life tends to pile things up when it decides you’re going to have a season of learning, whether you asked for it or not.

Somewhere, in the middle of all that, I became hyper-aware of something that most creatives encounter if they stay public, long enough: the feeling of being watched.

Not in a dramatic sense, but in the awkward awareness that people are reading your words, and some of those people don’t like you or necessarily have your best interests at heart. And once that kind of awareness settles into your brain, every sentence starts passing through a filter:

How will this sound?
What will they think?
Did I explain that well enough?
Should I have written that differently?
Why did I start this in the first place?
Who actually wants to read anything I have to write?
And if they do, are they tearing it apart somewhere I can’t see?

And the mind does the simplest thing it can think of…

It stops speaking. 

Silence is a very effective shield, and Winter is very good at amplifying those questions. But Winter also has a habit of doing something else that isn’t obvious while you’re inside it.

Things start to grow underground.

In the stillness that followed, life rearranged itself. The pieces of community that had collapsed began to re-form into smaller ones. Stronger ones.

The kind that grow out of wreckage.

And during that slow rebuilding, I started re-reading my old posts.

Partly because the quiet gave me space to reflect, but mostly because I realized how much I missed writing. 

It surprised me a little, which was a strange experience in itself. I couldn’t tell you exactly what prompted me to start digging through them again, but once I did, I kept going. 

I recognize the person writing those posts, and I’m proud of the words. But sometimes they feel like they belong to a slightly different version of me – a more proper, polished one that sounds the way I thought I was supposed to sound if I wanted people to take me seriously.

Maybe my Dad was right about one thing, even if the way he said it was wildly off: the way I write doesn’t always match who I am, conversationally. 

And I have always worried about that, even if I didn’t want to admit it. 

Especially to him.

Because sometimes it didn’t.

Sometimes it sounded like the version of me I hoped people would see: the worthy version. The articulate version. The one who had her thoughts arranged neatly and intelligently in tidy rows.

I also know this impulse isn’t unusual, and I’m not unique for feeling it. Most of us want to be seen as worthy. We want our thoughts to matter and to believe we’re not entirely alone in this weird, quirky world we share.

Maybe writing just exposes that desire more openly than other things?

The trick, I think, is remembering that worth isn’t granted by the crowd. 

My worth comes from the acts themselves: Paying attention to the world. Tending to plants and animals. Cooking hearty meals for my Favorite Humans. Studying our history. Tracing my ancestry. Watching the sky.

In doing those things, I’m already doing the work of meaning-making.

The audience is secondary.

It wouldn’t hurt if I softened my voice, a little, and wrote more in the voice of the person who would sit across from you in a room and have a great conversation.

 And it probably wouldn’t hurt if I said fuck a little more often, too.

Which brings us back to my Goblin Cave.

See what I did there?

It turns out caves aren’t really hiding places, at the heart of it. Not the good ones, anyway. They’re habitats – places where thinking happens and observations collect slowly over time.

Unfortunately, the internet works overtime to convince us that visibility equals relevance and constant output equals importance. It ties our value up with things like numbers, metrics, and large followings. 

It also likes to convince us that if we disappear for a while, we’ve somehow lost our place – that we’re no longer relevant and have forfeited our seat at the table. 

But life doesn’t really work the way the internet would like us to believe.

Most things that actually matter grow slowly, out of sight. 

Maybe the revolution won’t be televised, after all?

I think quiet observation can be a radical thing in an age of performance.

Not to disappear from the world, entirely, but to step outside the noise long enough to notice what’s actually worth saying. A soft place where ideas can sit for a while and steep before anyone else sees them.

Which means the cave isn’t really the opposite of speaking… In a strange way, it’s where speaking begins.

So, after a proper goblin-ing, I came back.

I’m continuing the thing that brought me here in the first place: thinking out loud, telling stories, and leaving small trails of thought behind for anyone who enjoys wandering through them.

And if you spend enough time here, you’ll probably figure out who I am without me needing to spell it out. Words and language matter, of course, but the way a person moves through the world matters more. 

That feels like the better way to be seen, if you fucking ask me.