Writing to save myself & to make it, too

A large part of me is writing to take care of myself. Another part is writing to make it, to be read and recognized and sought after. I am writing to open up opportunities and I am also writing to be okay, to save myself from the shards of loneliness and anger and inescapable sadness I can see in the corners of my mind-room. I am writing towards new habits, new ways of thinking, new beliefs I have about the world. I am writing in order to approach them, to give them their time upon the stage, to feel them (there has been too much not feeling in my life). Above all: to make something of all of this. When I churn my loneliness into paragraphs, the paragraphs become a source of pride—a testament to myself, of myself. In my head it goes something like this:

1. I write about how I’m feeling, therefore giving myself permission to feel.

2. I realize how much more complex the feeling is—how it has a temperature and a specific shape and color and part of my body where it resides.

3. I move from the physical feeling of it to the stories behind it, the memories, the people, the associations.

4. I write more and more as I give myself more and more permission to feel, to remember.

5. I arrive at some point where I start to love some part of what I’ve written, where the words seem to be tapping into something real, something unfiltered and loud. It’s often in the phrases, in the combinations of words (like how I feel right now about “unfiltered and loud”) that, like a chameleon, gets it just right and becomes the thing itself.

So in some way, writing to save myself—which I suppose is really just feeling what I’m feeling and then feeling the next thing and the next (one of my affirmations these days is “I am strong enough to feel anything”)—is how I get to some of my best writing. Writing exactly where I am and how I am is the pathway to some of my best writing—but more importantly, to writing itself.

It’s so simple, and yet for so long I was writing about a place that was not here. I thought those stories and theories—about lives I had not lived and people that were more ________ (insert your choice: cohesive, simple, quiet, happy) than me—were what I needed to be writing about.

I don’t know what people want to read, but I know what I want to write. I’m getting there. We're all getting there.

When I started to write ideas in my old planner.

Prompts and thoughts:

What are you feeling? What were you feeling before?

Where are you heading?