I haven’t written for three days. Three days and no words on the page. This is rare and immediately suspect. I realized the other day, on day two of no writing, that it is how I now hide from myself. Writing has become a place where I check in with myself, get honest with myself about myself and my relations with others. And the truth is the last three days have been hard and I haven’t wanted to be honest with myself. I haven’t wanted to come clean with myself...or you.
So I have avoided writing. Because that allows the lie or delusion to persist in my mind.
If I am not writing, I am avoiding some truth about myself that I do not want to face, some reality that is perhaps too painful to admit so I avoid it by avoiding really looking at it because it is painful or ugly or shameful.
My truth? I am lost right now. I don’t know what is happening in my life. I am doing some new things that that seems to have caused a relational earthquake in my life. I am shaking, my foundations threatened and I am running scared, terrified that each new aftershock will be my undoing. And like all people who are panicking, I am running in circles and only really working to make myself more vulnerable and in peril.
There I said it.
The truth I have been hiding from for days. Three days to be exact.
Perhaps this year Independence Day could be a day where I go within and face the demons I am terrified of, who tell me I am nothing and have ample evidence to support this conclusion. Perhaps, I can begin to untangle myself, to allow the current events to pull me apart and reorganize me into something that is more whole, more calm and more centered and in so doing create a better version of myself that is balanced.
I see my dysfunction. It is mine. I claim it, I name it so I can heal it and release it and allow some new behavior to grow in its place.
I am out of hiding. And while I see the benefit, I also feel somewhat like a chipmunk sitting on a log, waiting to be snatched up by an owl on a dinner rush...feelings are indeed, not facts, regardless it feels pretty raw, vulnerable and all too real to process...
Which is why I didn’t write for three days. But I have done the work to unearth it and I have brought out into the sunlight and owned it as my own, and while I really, really wish that made me feel better, I know that I have to give time, time. Nothing lasts, nothing stays. Everything we are, have and become, changes because the clock stops for no one. And in my case, the days that pass with blank pages of nothingness, actually demonstrate a great deal about where I am and how I am suffering. I can’t write because I do not want to be honest, with myself or you. I want to project the "carefree-having-the-time-of-my-life", and when I can’t even do that, I just hide...and not writing is my cover no-story.
So there it is, my ugly truth. I am afraid. I am in pain and I have no idea what I am doing...again, still.