Poem || The Revolution

Writing || My Fear of Words

I often try to keep my words inside of me. I hide them in some deep dark corner of my gut; pushed one against the other until they're like a constant belly ache. Some people feel their words in their minds, in their hearts, in their throats. Mine seem to sit in my stomach; I feel them there swirling around each other and tying themselves in knots that will take far too long to untangle. I've gotten good at ignoring the heavy feeling of words though, I almost don't notice them unless I stop and let myself be aware of how I feel inside my skin.

Sometimes I try and fool myself into thinking I could go without writing forever. Looking at my collection of notebooks makes me feel guilty; they're relics of a time when words were easy and I wanted to spill as many of them onto a page as possible. Now I get filled with a surge of anxiety just by opening the cover of a notebook filled with my words.

But then there's times when I see something or feel something that begs to be written about. Moments that I can feel aching to be captured and remembered. They crawl under my skin like an itch you can never reach. Stories of thunderclouds shapeshifting before my eyes, of wind gusts that bring the world to life and of people scurrying home like ants toward their loved ones.

But there's stories of darker things too; of the white noise that sometimes fills my mind until there is only see and hear, there is no think or process or comprehend. The story of the months in which I forgot who I was and what I liked, and existed entirely inside this white noise, scared that I would never remember myself again. These are the stories that make me scared to write, as though if I don't write them down it will keep them as something that is a little less than real, and a little less than real is manageable.

Mostly I hide my words because I know they often get read by people in my personal life and I do not like that. I do not like that at all. It's like leaving your diary out and having everyone think that means it's a free for all to read it. Maybe it is. Maybe that's something I have to come to terms with. I've always been more comfortable in front of strangers than in front of those I know, and the desire to share my thoughts with the world is constantly at war with my desire to keep things to myself.

I do not know if this will ever have a resolution. If I'll ever be able to throw words into the world carelessly without carefully weighing and testing each one first. Is this too much? Too little? Is this a truth better kept to oneself?

Will I ever be brave enough to untangle all the words I've hidden?

Poem || Ghosts

Video || October 2016

October seemed to be a blur of sewing, sewing and more sewing (and that one day where we drove to the most gorgeous landscape I've seen)