i write to keep from screaming

or I just scream

When I was twenty, I went on this date with a person and made the genuine but earnest mistake of telling him I wanted to write a book. “Every girl wants to write”, he scoffed. I laughed it off. Of course I did. I didn’t have the nous to scream. “I DON’T WANT TO WRITE, I NEED TO WRITE!!!,” and get up and go home. (Don’t get me started on the Things I Should Have Said list.)

I don’t want to write, I need to write. I find writing, language, the floral and the succinct,

1. incredibly romantic,

2. quite decadent, heavenly, sexy

3. a massive relief.

But all this is not why I write. I meet the pen - or let's be honest - keyboard, to find out what I think, what flowers or wars have been working through my body. I would be doing strange(r) things if I did not. I would be angrier. I might scream.¹ I might miss the odd, wonderful petals and buds taking shape. I might miss the large and small changes in the heart.

I write to give the chaos,

the beauty,

the delight,

the bunching up of emotion,

the loss,

the unmet, summer rage,

somewhere to go. My fingers are the exit route. The page, digital or otherwise, is the picture of results. The wildest part is that it works! Something happens when you write down exactly what you are thinking. Not the curated, polite, appropriate thing, but the raw, unfiltered, unsayable. The first thing is that it surprises you. The second is that something shifts. It is not about working anything out or writing your way to the answer. It’s about being entirely present. Quieting the unending loop. Listening to the stillness of your body, and letting it tell on you. It is about finding and naming the existing internal weather.

I’ve been developing a form of poetic repatterning™, not as a wordy or complicated concept, but as a daily act, a way of returning to the self through rhythm, metaphor and reflection. I’ve been talking so much about recalibration.

the utter - a place not to over-intellectualise pain, discomfort, or the unnamable, but to meet it in language. Let me tell you what else I do when I Just Can’t.

I sharpen my art of noticing, in the literal or abstract. I think of one line detailing how I feel (usually a metaphor), which may or may not make sense to me. I let it be strange, raw, and honest.