What I want my words to do

I never intended to let three months pass between posts. If you are reading this, you may thinking I am offering this as an apology to you. But I am not. First, apologizing would imply that my lack of posts had wronged you in some way, and that seems more than a little arrogant. More than a little ridiculous, even. But also I do not feel bad for it.

If I need to apologize to anyone, it would be to myself. I wish I had pushed myself a little more, through the many (many) stops and starts, the half-done posts I deleted; through the late night text messages I sent myself, or scrawled notes in the notebook on my nightstand, each with the words “for blog” at the beginning; through the thoughts and feelings that came fast and furious, but never made it to my fingers, to the page or computer screen, causing an emotional “bottleneck” that exhausted me. And when the words would tumble out, they would do so in a jumble of disjointed sentences I could not piece together into a coherent post.

But who cares?

I was trying to say it all perfectly, and I lost sight of the real reason I need to do this: to release it into the world, and maybe in doing so, to be seen. As I said, I am not arrogant enough to assume my words might make a difference in anyone else’s life, but I recognize that sharing my thoughts and feelings are crucial for my own sense of peace.

When I was exploring about grief writing recently, I came across this writing prompt from Writing Ourselves Whole by Jen Cross: What I want my words to do…

This is what I have come up with, so far:

I want my words to help explain me- to others and to myself.

I want my words to give tangible form to the incredible range of new emotions I feel.

I want my words to serve as my memory when the longing that is blocks the joy that was.

I want my words to lead me to a new sense of myself, where happiness does not feel like something I am doing by accident or, maybe worse, on purpose.

I want my words to help connect all the scattered pieces, the broken threads.

I want my words to break the dam holding in the raging river of anger I try to pretend is not there, but may burst through on its own in ways I cannot control if I do not write them!

I want my words to create a record of this awful aftermath, for me to reflect on in the future, and for Julia to know all the things she was too young to hear me say, but should know I felt.

I want my words to be beautiful in their ugliness.

I want my words to be read and appreciated, even if they are hardly “good writing.”

So, I am going to push myself more. I am going to finish a post, for goodness sake! And I hope you will continue to read and hold me in your hearts as you have been doing all along.

Stay tuned…