What I've dis-covered this last year is just now forming in my awareness as something I've known all along. I love to write. Yet somehow I seem to run away from it faster than towards this thing that feeds me and loves me the way nothing else does. What I'm learning the hard way is that the running is killing me faster than if I just gave in and lived the life that I'm longing to live. I think I may finally be getting to the point where it's not killing me softly anymore. It's now a matter of survival that I write and continue writing because this is the thing that will create Me instead of me creating it.
As much as I've been living in "survival mode" the last 2 1/2 years - doing whatever I can to make money to put food on the table and gas in the car - what I'm coming to realize is that doing what I love is becoming a matter of survival, spiritual survival. I lived for a long time out of touch with who I am. Simply surviving, doing what I'm supposed to do, doing what I'm told to do and not feeling anything that floated outside of nefarious discontentment to anger. I've grown and learned how to feel again and know that there is a whole world out there to explore and writing is what has gotten me here. And now, as I step into this new year, new decade, and new place in myself, I know that in order for me to not only survive but thrive I must meet this creative process in myself head on. Face it fully, see it, embrace it and claim it. And love it for it's ability to love me fully and without prejudice.
I stumbled upon this place the other day while doing some journaling. I sat with the intent to write about my day, what I was working on and working through, what I was worrying about and how to get from this moment to the next. I picked up the pen and began to write and soon I realized that all the things that I worry about all day long, all the things that I think I'm doing wrong and what I'm lacking just weren't there. None of it existed at the place where my pen landed on the page. All of that was just gibberish working to distract me. And what flowed out from there brought me back to knowing that I must stop running.
"I put pen to paper and I am who I am meant to be. I am Me, right here in black and white, right here on this page. There's no telling what will come out and how I will be loved as the pen guides smoothly from left to right. Somehow, with pen in hand, I am the me I am eternally yearning to be. It is a relationship that ironically I have a hard time putting into words. It is elusive and strong and love itself. The very string of brush strokes simplified to a place of honor. Movements & revelations sometimes hard to understand and sometimes only available in one moment and not the next. This relationship as elusive as it can seem to be is really a life blood for me. It holds me and talks to me and asks me to reveal myself through it all the time. It is my expression of me that transcends what is supposed to be. It is my art, my creation, my expression of my creations that I am, and all of these at once. It is nothing more that the Me I so desperately want to be. It is the sands in the hourglass and the hourglass itself. It is all of me. It is the facets and the feelings of me and all the joy in between. My life makes sense here on the page, pen gliding across. The words may be imprecise and at times uninspired but here, right here, I make sense to me and that is really all that matters." -Journal Entry
The only resolution I can make with clear determination is that I will pursue my writing. No matter what it looks like or if any other person alive gets it. It's what I must do for myself, it is what creates me, it is what moves me forward. So here's to a year of stepping out of my own comfort zone and living a life of uncomfortable greatness, where I can breathe again.
Happy New Year!
