"I feel like I want to write some songs and I don't know how to go about doing it. Usually it's the lyrics that are a problem, and I think I am not really cut out to be a lyricist"

A restless desire sits at the center of this statement: the pull to make songs exists, but the path is hazy. The obstacle is not music itself, but language, the part of songwriting that forces a maker to declare something plainly, to be seen. Instruments can suggest, evoke, and swirl in ambiguity; lyrics must choose, risking sentimentality, cliché, or overexposure. The admission of not feeling “cut out” to be a lyricist names a familiar stall point where artistic urge meets the fear of being ordinary or untrue.

It also hints at the tyranny of identity labels. To say “I’m not a lyricist” can sound like a fixed trait rather than a skill in progress. Many musicians develop fluency in harmony and rhythm through years of repetition, but expect words to arrive fully formed or not at all. That myth of inspiration punishes the patient work lyrics require: freewriting on dull days, rewriting on good ones, absorbing voices from poetry and prose, testing lines aloud for their mouthfeel and rhythm. The problem may be less a lack of talent than a missing process.

There is a deeper vulnerability, too. Melodies can hide the self; words pin it to the page. Uncertainty about what to say often masquerades as uncertainty about how to say it. The fear is not only technical but existential: Do I have a voice? Do I have anything worth saying? Yet a voice frequently emerges through constraint and iteration, writing toward a scene, a detail, an overheard sentence, or shaping vowels to a melody’s contour until sense meets sound.

There is permission embedded here as well. Collaboration is honorable; many great songs are co-written, and many great musicians lean into instrumentals. Still, the longing to write songs suggests a threshold waiting to be crossed. Doubt can be a compass: it points straight at the work that could expand the artist.