She had notebooks full of songs. She played open mics, got polite claps, and went home with compliments that felt like sugar packets, sweet but unsatisfying. One night, after a show that went well but meant nothing, she sat alone in her kitchen. Her cat yawned. Her tea cold. She stared at her guitar like it lied to her. Then she asked herself a question she’d avoided for years: “Why am I always writing as if someone else is listening?” She didn’t answer, just wrote clumsy lines at first, then something real. Just honest. Next week, she sang the new material. Half the room stopped talking. It wasn’t her best performance. She missed a chord. But something in the room had changed. Afterward, someone came up, “Thank you. That was something I’ve felt but couldn’t say.” She smiled, quietly. Not relieved, just sure. From then on, she stopped writing songs that aimed to land. She wrote songs that tried to stay.