Why I write

I write because if I don’t, I forget the truth. The pageantry of tales my mind can conjure would be alarming to the unskilled, yet I am adept. Survival has been my maze and my muse. I navigate my way beautifully through thorny rose bushes, never stopping to mend my wounds until a soft landing becomes available. Then, and only then, do I cauterize the flesh wounds, leaving the deepest and oldest to remind me that I have been here before. Reminding me that hind sight is for the wise who choose to look in the mirror and see what stares back. And as the scars fade and some callus over, my deepest mended blemishes will tell my stories.

I cloak the newly fresh scars, along with the old sentimental favorites, overachiever and shame. Two emotions that I wear like jammies, warm and safe in place I know. After years of dressing in these fibers, they have woven themselves through my epidermis, and attached themselves to my DNA, ready at a moment’s notice to be flagged that it’s shames turn to tell the overachiever “time to cut bait before everyone…hurry….run!”

Our pretty eyes don’t like to see scars. Mine not coming in black and blue gives them less value. Leaving me desperate to prove my scars are tangible, that my pain is not invisible even if the proof is. Writing gives my scars color and texture, writing can make my scars look however I paint them. Bedazzling loss and longing in the glittery bubble of a new romance, and calling it passion. White-washing the stained ego when the story I have told turns dark and grey. Making sense of it all seems futile in the troughs of a mental temper tantrum.

And so I write

Writing allows me to run around in my craziest outfit and dance to the color of flowers. The privilege of feeling the mutability of music’s ever changing four chords penetrating my heart. At times the reverence of a lyrical declaration to love, can push my heart to its most painful point. Writing allows me to find the freedom to not be of fully present while my fingers mystically dance around finding the precise words I have never expressed, even to myself.

I have never been able to lie on paper. It is the only place I tell the absolute truth, which is why my papers are mostly bare. The other part is I have no idea what I will say once I start. Not in the writer’s block way, I mean in the “writer gone mad” kind of way. Writing for me, once I am “there” is what some would call an out of body experience. When I am being who the words need me to be, present and open, I just close my eyes and the words pour out.

If I am to be honest, I am no longer comfortable in my skin not writing. My life has been a treasure trove of research to draw from. I am ready to share my scars and see them as beauty marks.