Eleventh Day - What Sucks

The last few days I've just been doing some private journaling, rather than posting. I may go back and try to glean a few bits to post, but trust me, I am sparing my small but loyal audience. (Hi Mom.) Writing is such an excellent therapy for the mind and spirit, it is easy to make any journal entry all about one's misery. After all, you get together with friends after work, you order some drinks, what's the topic of discussion? Surely not to talk your fabulous life. Unless you're that person. And if you are, we all know you're faking it, so get over yourself already.

Seriously though, when people get together to unwind, they talk about what sucks. It might be politics, jobs, family that are bleeding our psyche dry at the moment and monopolizing our waking thoughts, doesn't really matter. Very seldom do we wax lyrical about how "life is pretty much okay".

When I was in junior high, discovering writing poetry for the first time, this phenomenon was ideal. Here I was, full of angsty truth as I saw it and all I had to do was start writing and the emotion flowed like black eyeliner. It was cathartic and freeing to write melodramatic poems and stories, to wallow in my 13 year old pain and to feel quite transformed by the act of writing emotion on a page. Even when I think now of some of those awful testimonies to my long hours spent reading Sylvia Plath, I have a generous spirit towards that 13 year old. God bless my nerdy little self.

I'm not sure exactly when the transformation occurred for me, but if I could find the moment, I believe I would label it "when I grew up". This was the moment when I shifted from enjoying the catharsis of the page to understanding its brutal and unforgiving nature. It is so easy to lie with our voices, we do it all the time. You look great in those pants, the check is in the mail or no, I'm not angry. Our inflections and expressions smooth the gaps and make our little necessary lies go down smoothly so that we can interact with each other without having to resort to cudgels. Writing is a different matter. Writing is between you and the page, or rather your full self and your blank self. The only way to fill that page (or screen) is to drop that bucket down and bring something out from within, be it superficial or deep. It is possible to lie to yourself of course, but it is not easy. It takes work, and it becomes extremely evident with each editorial pass.

The day I grew up was the day I realized that the page was not my friend or confidante, but my betrayer. No matter what I intended to write, I always lay bare more than I meant to, whether it was a poem, an essay or even a letter. Why this seems to skew to the negative, the fearful and the sad, I still don't completely understand. I suppose that for me, spoken words are chatter, porous stoppers to keep the functional world separate from the negative world in my head. What is positive, loving and hopeful flows freely through the barriers as "acceptable content". Written words, on the other hand, are doorways and have the power to let out the whole rabble that lives in my brain. Opening a door, there is always a chance you won't like what is on the other side, but by the time you've figured it out, the bastard has his foot wedged and you're well and truly screwed.

There is no way out of this mess of doors and rabble and ooze but to write it out and perhaps at the end you have something you can share and perhaps you don't. Hopefully you've retained a small amount of truth from whatever crawled out of that door, sufficient that someone other than your narcissistic self can appreciate the workings of your fevered brain.

And if not, well, that's what blogs are for.