What Will I Find?

If I begin to unpack my thoughts in this way, allowing thoughts to flow directly from my mind to my fingertips to the screen, I am not entirely sure what will appear on said screen before my eyes. What if I don't like it? what if the unabridged, unedited version of my mind is repulsive to me? What if it is to others?

But -- isn't this why we write? To find out what lives inside of us? And not only what lives inside us as the writers, but to discover what lives inside of all of humankind? Isn't that the point of it all? I write to learn things I didn't know I knew until I began to write them down, and this, too, is a surprise to me even as I write it.

I am supposed to write until my head is empty, and a part of me worries that will never happen because a writer always brims with more words waiting to be spoken. Well, written, I should say. And yet -- somehow, I know my head will empty itself. Because I know so well the familiar feeling of writing in my journal, almost frantic, scribbling lines of thought into existence upon my page in black ink, desperate to pour ideas and feelings and the very idea of being alive, onto a page and capture it there, where it will remain, stained in ink, long after I've forgotten I ever felt that way or had that epiphany or underwent that experience. I know the feeling of dumping myself onto page after page after page, and then, suddenly -- it's enough. I'm done. My pen drops, I let out a breath, I scan the last sentence of my page, I give a shake to my aching wrist, massage my cramped fingers, look at the window, and bask in the feeling that my innards are now clinging to a page, rescued from the abyss of the mystery of my being and held there to paper for me to look back upon later. My head is empty in that moment. My words have run freely, and they have run out. In those moments, I feel overflowingly full, yet marvelously emptied and unburdened. It is that sweet moment of both. Both empty, and full. Reminiscent, and hopeful. Clearheaded, yet awed at the mystery. Both the excavator and the hidden treasure, at the same time.

So, because I know this feeling, I am not worried that I will have to keep tapping away at this keyboard for eternity. I know there will be a moment in which my words have run their race and my head is, for an instant, empty.

What a gift this challenge has given to me to be able to freely write until I reach that point. A mess and tangle of words usually reserved for my journal will appear for all the world to see, and that thought does not make me afraid.

This is one of the greatest gifts of being an artist, of any kind, and writing is art -- this not being afraid. Most of the world is afraid to show their vulnerabilities, and we are, too. But we cannot give in to that fear. To create art is to embrace vulnerability. it is to expose it in others, too, to bring out the worst and the best in humans.

Sometimes I am afraid I will never be able to do that -- that all of my writing falls short, and always will. That I will never write something that perfectly captures a moment, the essence of a perosn. And I am right to think my writing will fall short. I know I am. In part because I am a human, and in part because existence is to broad a thing to be captured into words, no matter how expertly spun. The thing that is wrong is for that to make me afraid. If I choose not to write because I am afraid it will not be perfect, that would be like choosing not to live because life isnt perfect, and that is unthinkable. Life is unbearably, achingly beautiful, and is the furthest thing from perfect. What if my writing, too, then, could be both? What if it could be so wonderful it makes my heart ache, and yet be flawed, at the same time?

Isnt that what it means to be alive?

I hit my sweet spot. I havent yet realized the meaning of my words, but I found the spot when my fingers wanted to stop, and my brain had no follow-up thought.

Signing off, L.