This is a thing. I would like to share with you my experience with it. If anything I say, is something you can relate to? Then the risk, and vulnerability is completely worth it.
Sometimes I am sitting here, trying my best to write something worth reading, and this sneaking little snake of self doubt, better word, deprecation creeps in and suffocates all my words.
Get this, my first, immediate reaction? "You have all day every day to write to your heart's content, what are you being all wimpy for? This is it! Do it! What are you waiting for? What's your issue?
I could go on.
When I catch myself talking to my own self in this manner, I freeze. Literally. As if a police officer was screaming at me with their gun pointed smack-dab center-mass. No, a police officer hasn't ever needed to stop me but I have experienced guns pointed smack-dab, well, you get the point. :)
This is part of what it feels like, to "seemingly" have all the time in the world, with no one bossing you or supervising or dictating any type of structure for your day. It isn't as perfect as it sounds.
Story plots, the scenarios, events and descriptions of such, are all colored by, if not tainted by, the trauma. It is absolutely maddening to have more than three big story-lines moving, and be compelled to write in each one, at the exact same time. The confusion of emotions so warped around the rules you are trying to remember, and you practically create new trauma on your own-damn self. For trying to "not bury it" or "keep it bottled up." And then? Nothing. Frozen. Confused. Blank. But just under the ice, a caldera of anger, a churning boil of some of the worst experiences of your life.
But it's time to let it go. It's time to crack a fissure open and let some steam out, before the magma blows. Because I am safe and sound in my own home. Take a breath, face it. Write it. That's what I do. I write.
Bravery is trying to type through the blur of tears streaming down your face. Going back to edit where the typos exceeded the comprehensible vocabulary. Those one or two sentences. That paragraph, turns into a chapter. Then another.
The biggest thing to understand, though, is that the very act of sobbing over your words, is to heal. Each letter [key] typed is a bit of pain released. It is put somewhere other than the pit of unmentionables within you.
So I keep writing, even if I only hit 2000 words, scattered within three different projects. And if I am able to write a sentence or two, even a paragraph in the really scary one? The non-fiction project?
The tears, and mountain of balled up tissues is completely worth the pain of it.
Writing through trauma, is like removing shrapnel. It's going to hurt like a son-of-ah, but the healing can't even begin until the obstructions are removed. Experiencing trauma, of whatever kind, is for your heart and mind to be punctured by foreign objects all at the same time.
You are going to bleed, before you start to heal.
Writing, is to bleed. Each word, is to heal.
Kerry Morgan~
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