Returning

Writing to get back to myself.

Thanks to my best frenemy Ben for the new logo + wordmark

I stopped writing earlier this year because everything got too hard. I’ve always needed a little hope inside of me to propel my writing—hope about my future in some capacity, however small, and hope about life itself—and I lost it completely. Life had been a battle for a few years by that point, and I was succumbing to defeat. Whoever I used to be was gone and I couldn’t find her, no matter how hard I tried (and I tried really fucking hard). 

Everything I was feeling (and in many ways continue to feel) was bleak and raw and the thought of broadcasting that to even a small number of people on the internet was nauseating. I’ve always worn a lot of my inner world on the page but as I’ve gotten older that act feels more vulnerable and I find myself second-guessing it. I’m not really sure I want people to know how much I’m suffering or to subject that suffering to outside opinions. Opinions I’ll never know but will wonder about too much for my own good, because that is my nature.

But to get back to myself at all, I know I have to write. It’s one of the only tools at my disposal, with a body that can’t move like it used to or do many of the things it once loved. I often resent that writing is so core to who I am because it’s not always easy to face my thoughts in such an official way. Working through the muck of everything you think to find meaning can be a slog. Being honest about your thoughts—and I always want to be honest, not idealistic—is scary. 

A decade ago (!) I corresponded with the writer Heather Havrilesky during another difficult time in my life and she essentially ordered me to write more. Her writerly sixth sense saw through me—that more than anything else, I was a writer, and I needed to be getting more words on the page even if they didn’t make sense, were imperfect, or if the process of doing so was hard. I think about that often, especially when I’m not writing. 

On nights when I struggle to fall asleep, it’s usually because I’m writing something in my head, bursting with ideas that by the morning I’ve either forgotten or deemed stupid (I’ve been working on softening my inner dialogue for at least 20 years). There are so many things I want to say about living with immense physical pain, deciding you want to die, then deciding you want to live, being swallowed whole by regret, falling in a love that saves you every day, working through trauma you didn’t realize you had, nurturing your body after running away from it for years, rediscovering who you were before all of life’s bullshit distorted your image, moving slow when you’ve only ever gone fast, questioning every single thing you thought you knew for sure…

None of it is really cohesive, it’s not something I can package neatly, brand, and sell. For now, it’s just pure feeling that some part of me clearly wants to release, maybe to offload some of the heavy, heavy weight of what I’ve been carrying for the past three-ish years. If I wait until some imaginary point in the future when “life is good” to let it out, the moment may never materialize. I’ll also miss out on an opportunity to work through and share something real, enforcing my own faulty belief that to show myself fully, without sugarcoating, is bad. And I know that my truest, least-encumbered self would be best served pushing against that.