Maybe I should first deal with the fact that I’m afraid to write That I won’t do what I tell others to do when they can’t seem to get started which
is to just write. So I sit around trying to determine if academic writing -3 and 3 ½’s degrees later (because I’ve quit more than I’ve finished –yeah figure that one out)- have stolen my ability to create and write creatively. Am I now so concerned about making sure that my writing makes sense to someone other than me:
that my coma’s dashes and periods are in the correct place; that I’ve structured my paragraphs and sentences correctly; that I’ve forgotten my real reason for writing
not because I have to but because I NEED to? Not because I have a paper that’s due or a report or some stupid lesson plan that must be turned in by Friday 4 p.m. the week before for review, but because I need to
to live to survive this crazy home I was born into to make sense of this more stupid world I had to navigate through during adolescence and keep my sanity in the process of both wombs (because they made me) or because God laid something so heavily in my spirit that in order for my cerebrum to process it into reality it manifested in my poetry or that I needed to let my pen bleed so my broken heart could mend. There was a time that writing healed me. Now I feel so abused the writer in me because my creativity, my need my raw hunger to write has been replaced through the decade of things I was “required” to do. Like a love that has lost its romance,
a marriage between two people that are just going through the motions and now I lay next to my proverbial pen like a couple that sleeps back to back every night. The presence of the other because bills need to be paid and a 1 income’ household just won’t do, obligations to kids that need to be driven to school, dishes that need to be washed, the oil needs to be changed, the grass needs to be cut, in laws need to be paid attention to, holidays and such. So no one leaves but everything that made us we is gone. I used to not just live to write, I wrote so I could live—it was the creative outlet that saved my life. Now, I can barely even go thru the motions. Is there marriage counseling for me and my Macbook: my pen? Can I get back to where
I begin to write with the passion of when writing was my beginning and end when writing was my best friend? Then I tell myself that its discipline. You get out what you put in. maybe its that i wont put in the work because its no longer so easy. Perhaps I need to be the friend and rescue my writing like my writing rescued me time and
again... Perhaps I should not have given up and thrown the towel in so easily as I did time and again through the decade. I can no longer live feeling like such an integral part of me has died.
clay and The Potter 