Date: November 7, 2021

Sunday at 6:17pm

I want so bad to be able to turn the pain of the last year into poetry. I want to be able to write away the wrong, but the words don’t come easily anymore. The urge is unconscious. I will always want to write. It was never just a past-time when I had time. For me, it was basic instinct. For me, it was the difference between life and death. The only healthy way I knew how to cope and my only hope for faith. But I didn’t write. Instead, I would spend hours sitting in front of a blank page, waiting for me to show up. Waiting to wrangle words from my wrists, but the words don’t come easily anymore. Not as easy as sadness. Not as quickly as the tears. I wanted badly to write away the wrong, but what do you do when writing no longer FEELS right?

At first, I tried working out, tried modeling, tried therapy.  Hell, I even went back to bartending. I was drunk and high, and tired. I was depressed, and ridden with anxiety. I became a shell of my former self. The woman I used to be almost feels like a figment of my imagination because nobody noticed. Nobody realized that the woman who walked out of that room was not the same woman who walked inside. And the woman I am now is the woman I had to become in order to come out on the other side of it all. Shutting down, checking out, sleepwalking through life, showing up missing on paper, and in my every day, while avoiding sobriety felt vital to my survival. I still had the unconscious urge to create, but what if the person I had to become doesn’t possess the ability or imagination to be creative? I want so bad to be able to turn the pain of the last year into poetry. But what if who I am now no longer believes that pain can be repurposed or reimagined into something positive, and no longer believes that life and all of its experiences is beautiful, and no longer believes that my story is worthy of becoming art?

The person I had to become was almost primitive. Unevolved. Emotionally unavailable. Surviving, sure, but not actually living. Taking time to reflect and remember it all, was a luxury that I couldn’t yet afford. I eventually realized that the words that I thought didn’t come easily, were waiting for me on the other side of my own devastation. I just had to be ready to let them break my heart a little. I couldn’t turn the pain into poetry, without letting the pain hurt me first. So,  I closed my eyes and opened the floodgates. In an instant, a lump swelled in my throat, my chest tightened, my stomach tied itself in knots, and I let it all wash over me. And it wasn’t until I let it hit me. It wasn’t until I could let it in, with all of its sadness and all of its tears, that I could truly let it go. Today the words came easily and went freely. And between these pages, I found what I thought I had lost. Myself.