New prompt: Untitled

When you just want to write

Why is it so much easier to write sometimes with one or two words to get us going? I suppose it gives us a more definitive starting point; has whatever we write feel more like a piece than a journal entry.*

That said, this morning I had my head blown off by Rebecca Barry’s latest piece, which she actually found in an old notebook. It was so powerful it inspired me—for the first time in a really long time—to just get something out. I grabbed the prompt from this week’s Writing Guide chapter, but ended up not really needing it. Here’s what came through.

This morning, I just want to write.

Unusual, but I’m going with it.

I set my 8-minute timer and noticed an extra 30 seconds was already tacked on in the timer app. I don’t know how that happens but it does often. Life giving me a little extra time.

Generous. Mysterious.

This isn’t how I want to do it. I don’t want to be racing a clock. I want to say something without the pressure cooker.

I don’t mean to pressure cook people. That’s the last thing I want to do, have ever wanted to do. If anything I err on the side of giving folks space. Too much space. Turning around and leaving the place, the relationship, lest I overstay my welcome. The well-worn muscle memory of continuing conversations over my shoulder as I walk away from the other person, who is still fully engaged. Let me leave you alone. I’ll leave you alone.

I know where this comes from. Exactly where it does. She never wanted me in her womb. She wanted me to leave her alone. She ignored me until she couldn’t. And then sent me out of her sight, out of her life.

All I can see now are the people reading this wondering why I’m not angrier about that. Why I haven’t spent my whole life mourning it, fighting it, trying to make it right. Why I haven’t been on some crusade demanding to be let back in. Why.

I don’t know. For one thing, shortly after I was dropped I was scooped up to fill the hole of emptiness in an entirely different group of people. They loved me fiercely, in a way that I couldn’t argue with. Even if the love only ever gathered a half-millimeter outside of me, some energetic second skin (what is the stuff wetsuits are made of?) ensuring it never got all the way in, because I didn’t deserve it. I wasn’t supposed to be here.

And maybe I should be mourning that now. How for so long the insistent love only ever hovered.

I don’t know who these voices are telling me I need to feel differently about all of this. I can only tell you that every discovery like this, every moment such a realization made it into my consciousness, I have felt liberated, joyful, wanting to tell the world.

I was denied! I was rejected! And then I rejected you! All the while living my life as an unfillable black hole, my need for validation and assurance and things more infinite than most living creatures. Check that shit out!

I want to celebrate knowing this. Because in knowing it, I suppose, it frees me from having to blame myself or anyone else.

Sounds overly simple. But hell, I only have eight (and a half) minutes here. Forces a girl to slice to the molten core of the matter. And that’s it I guess. That’s what I want to tell you.

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* Piece? Journal Entry? Same-same?

Folks ask me this a lot. What is the difference? I think the difference is more in feeling than content. The feeling being “who wants to read the meandering contents of my head?” But then sometimes the meandering contents of your head come out on the page or in conversation and things are made new. The reader or listener is changed. You’re changed.

I don’t know. Let me know what you think of the above meandering head contents, or, better yet, write your own, share them here. Let’s explore what ‘counts’ as an ‘official’ piece of writing. Better yet, let’s blur the lines, let’s dissolve them altogether, and just be free to express.

Set a timer for 8 (and a half?) minutes, and see what bubbles forth.