I don’t know what to say when I sit down to write. I don’t know where to save the stories I start. I have things to say. There are lots of things I want to talk about. I struggle to find the inspiration to keep writing when I don’t know who is going to see it. I don’t know what the purpose is so I don’t commit to any of the stories I want to tell. I don’t start saying the things I want to say and then I so badly want someone to know them.
I write to make sense of things for myself. I think that’s probably why not much of anything has made sense to me, for a while. For longer than I’m willing to admit. But I guess that’s admitting it right there.
I thought I would work tonight. I thought I would get ahead. I’m not. Instead, I went searching for a piece of writing of mine that was published by an author whose words I hold on to like they’re biblical verses unbeknownst to others. The site isn’t live anymore, and because all I think about is work I wondered how much it might cost to buy it. But the article I wrote for it won’t be live anymore. And those words will be mine again, to tell a new way.
I guess I thought maybe I used up all of my words. Today, I heard someone say they had no more ideas and they’d used all of them up. Maybe we don’t use them up when we write, or when we share parts of ourselves. I sometimes fancy thinking when I tell someone something, when I share something, that it’s no longer mine. But writing is different.
Sometimes I feel like the things I’ve written about become truths because they’re on paper. That my reality is somehow solidified by my thoughts and feelings about something that I probably wrote while I was feeling something very strong. I know better than to believe everything I think and feel. There’s a good chance it isn’t aligning with reality, even if my perception of reality is that something’s wrong. There’s a good chance nothing is wrong.
I haven’t learned to trust myself yet. I hear footsteps and think avalanche. For some reason, I don’t like to take the advice to heart of wise ones before me who have said, “if you hear hoofbeats, don’t think zebras. It’s probably a horse.” There’s some iteration of that phrase you’ve heard, I’m sure. What I wonder is why no one really takes it to heart, why so many of us have to find truth in what they feel when the truth is you shouldn’t trust everything you feel. Feelings are fleeting. Emotions have an expiration point.
Everything seems clearer to me when I write from a place where I hide nothing. Where words become simple. I didn’t say they become easy or that they ever might come easily. But they come simply and some of the simplest things are best. I over complicate the things that are the most straightforward by forgetting to write about them clearly and simply.
There is a lot of picking up the pieces I have to do. There is a reason they name humans after hurricanes. There are a lot of things I need to write about to understand. Maybe to forget, forgive, get rid of… But what I think is much like the advice of a writing teacher.
Write every day. Read more than you write. There isn’t too much else in the world that matters. It doesn’t matter if it’s published. It doesn’t matter if anyone but me reads it. I want to feel cohesive again. Maybe pulled together. I don’t see myself for what I am when I’m moving so quickly.
I think I missed the point.
I’ve spent so much time running. Like I’m trying to pass an exit that leads to a road where a memory lives I don’t much care for. I blow by the stop signs and get tickets I don’t remember because I didn’t read the sign that there was a traffic camera.
I have said before there are seasons of life we wish by too quickly. I have wished myself away from discomfort. I have pushed and punished myself because I know harm like comfort. Denying myself the satisfaction of something is beyond the commonplace.
It’s become impossible to ignore.
The responsibility of presence and mindfulness is enormous. Sometimes I like to shirk the responsibility by becoming victim to a past I am no longer apologizing for. I set foot into a boat, knowing full well that I can swim. I know how to row. I know how to drive the boat. I know how to turn on the motor. And yet when someone else says they can do it I let them and then our boat isn’t in the direction I wanted to go in and I’m screaming and no one hears it because we’re going too fast in the wrong direction and the wind is too strong.
The responsibility to yourself is enormous and I am not sure we spend enough time tending to that responsibility. When I’m here, when I’m going the speed limit, there is nothing else. There is nothing else in a way I cannot explain because it is what bliss feels like. It’s nothing and it’s everything all at once. Time feels slow. It feels good and it feels like this is the kind of memory that makes the person I want to be in fifteen years from now.
There’s so much to say and if you say things simply. If you say them and you look at them from different angles and you try to make sense of them, you might find you have answers you didn’t expect. And what you have to say isn’t so similar to things others have said.
I missed the point, that much has become impossible for me to ignore. Lately, I’ve felt a change. I understand the way the wind is blowing, at least I think I do this time. I’ve been wishing a season past because there are so many roads I don’t want to take the exit onto. I don’t want to go there but I found comfort at those rest stops. Harm is what I came to know as comfort because I did not know how to ask for what I needed from those who loved me because there’s no reason some of the things that have happened had to happen. They just happen and it is a fact and a truth I struggle to free myself from and I struggle to come to terms with.
I am responsible for what happens to me moving forward even though some of the things that happened may or may not have been in my control. What we do now, is. And I think I know what the answer is — because it’s what the answer always has been and always will be.
I have to write. And I have to do it more often than I talk. More often than I share bits and pieces with others because there’s a story I have to tell. I don’t know what it is yet. I’m sure there are many stories, actually. There’s a lot I’d like to share. I will, at some point, but maybe I have to put in the time, first. Maybe first, I have to build the habit into the fabric of every day again. I did say I wanted to romanticize the mundane.
I am grounded, rooted in fertilized soil for the very first time. Possibly not the very first time, but the first time in a long time. I needed no guidance but other than what I had to say to myself. I said it simply. I said it clearly. Maybe not in any concise manner, but then again, I do so love the way words sound when they’re strung together with care.
I will take care to water the soil. I know crops fail and harvests are not as full as you expected them to be based on the care you took. But I also know that to be, to really live and live in the way life wants you to live and love her, you have to put something in the soil to reap and sow and watch grow and nurture. You have to cultivate the garden.
I will write my words into the beds of soil, and I will sow something from them whether the harvest is bountiful or not. There is another season ahead. I guess it’s a good thing that article vanished. I feel like a little girl, waiting for peter pan to come visit her. He’s coming, I feel like, to open the window and allow me to think in riddle again.
I will remember to write.
