wordy

Last night I was up to my ears in paper and envelopes when it occurred to me that writing sometimes keeps me divorced from my feelings.

I had talked the day before to a woman undergoing cancer treatment whose friends were encouraging her to write about it, to which she'd replied, "I don't want to write about it!" Made sense to me. In the midst of things I wasn't surprised that she didn't have the energy or inclination to write. And perhaps she chooses not to dwell. Her call.

Anyway last night I recalled telling her that writing had really helped me following my mother's death. I hadn't been suggesting, simply commenting on my own recent experience. But now something else came to mind. Perhaps it's the yin/yang of things. Writing gave me solace and connection in those early days and since then, and at times the physical act of writing also enables me to be the observer and reporter -- not so emotionally vulnerable to whatever lies beneath. I can stay at arm's length, talk around things and never get to the heart of them. That's okay, but I wasn't particularly aware of that until yesterday.

I've been struggling with seemingly endless rewrites of an end-of-year/beginning-of-a-new-one letter for family and friends. Begun in December at the Solstice, it's now obvious that I've been talking a lot and saying very little. I've been pushing. So yesterday I began another and will just have to cough up another 2 cents next week to send something that speaks more honestly and openly.

Like meditation, perhaps I needed that first attempt to clear my mind. The length was the tip-off: The only way I seemed to be able to shrink three pages was to make the type smaller! That was the warm-up and now I'm ready for what feels more real...told in fewer pages no doubt.

So writing got me here and writing will get me through it. This activity has also shown me that I need to balance time at the keyboard and pushing the pen with lengthy pauses and less chatter so that the truth -- both fact and feeling -- can reveal itself. Authentic self-expression isn't measured by word count ... I knew that.