On Writing

"Thank you for letting me read your poems. It was like being alive twice." - Li Po, Chinese poet

Photo Credit: Melissa Vega, 25th Hour Studios

There is something about writing that brings about this experience of being alive twice; there is something about creating art that offers this both for the artist and the consumer.  I write because the world makes more sense to me in writing than it does in any other way.  Over the past few years, my writing wires feel like they've gotten a little twisted.  I think some of them got frayed by things like graduate school and long work hours at the hospital, maybe they even burned out from just mere fatigue. I go months sometimes without writing anything, and then I start to feel like I don't know what's going on around me and how to process all of the inputs I'm receiving.  And after careful thought, I come to the conclusion that I must once again write.

So I do.  I pull out my computer and open a blank document to start typing. Except, over the past few months, I opened a lot of documents and only wrote about five lines.  I logged onto my computer tonight and looked at all of the titled essays I started writing that I never completed.  Sometimes I leave them unfinished on purpose, thinking maybe one day I'll be inspired by the few words on the page.  And at times, that happens. But other times, those words sit on the page with a lot of empty space for years, until I one day decide to delete the document and say farewell to the thoughts I once had. This essay was born out of one such fit-- I read this quote from Li Po and just fell completely into this beautiful, magical idea of being alive twice through art. 

The past few months of my life have been incredibly challenging.  I have walked through deep pain that, at many points, has felt like there's been no bottom to.  The depth of it has overwhelmed me at times, and just when it does not feel that there can be any more to it, that we must surely be reaching the bottom, I sink a little deeper into it.  I've been reminded of something I read once about scuba diving  throughout all of this. I've never been diving before, and because of my asthma, it doesn't seem likely that I'll ever be able to in a safe way, but I have read a bit about what happens to your body when you dive.  I think there is a temptation, when you are in deep waters, to push off the bottom to rise to the top as quickly as you can.  But divers know that when you are at certain depths, you have to rise slowly to the top, no faster than about 30 feet per minute.  If you ascend much faster than that, your blood essentially starts to bubble due to inability to eliminate nitrogen quickly-- kind of like when you open a bottle of soda.  You can die because of these bubbles causing heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary emboli. 

And so while I've been trying to get up quickly from the depths of what we have walked through this year, I have had to ascend slowly and wait in the midst of some of the darker days for longer than I would like, out of sheer necessity, wishing all along that I could swim to the top for a little more air and little more light. In my pain, I thought maybe I would write.  But what I am finding is that the words all bump together and start to sound jumbled.  I start writing one thing and my mind begins to wander with all of the possibilities of something else.  So when I read this quote by Li Po, I thought, well isn't that just so beautiful.  And reading it almost made me feel alive twice. 

So tonight, though I have work I could be doing after hours and laundry sitting in a pile next to me waiting to be folding, I thought I would start writing again.  And it may just be a mini-essay, a brief thought or two captured and pinned down.  But the world makes a whole lot more sense to me when I'm able to write about it.  One day soon, I think I'll pick up my manuscript and start editing and writing it again, but for now, I think I'll just sit here for a while and share some of the things whirling around in my head in this safe space, where I've always felt that I could be the version of myself that feels the most genuine. 

I can't promise that I'll write much at all. It seems that whenever I resolve to do so, life becomes so bubbling and full again that I rarely make the time to put pen to paper.  As I sit here tonight, preparing to close this out, I feel lighter already, like I've been able to release some of the swirling thoughts that felt so hard to capture for so many months.  Maybe capturing them and putting them here gives them a chance to be alive twice, too.

XO,

C