How brave am I to expose myself here? How painful the baring of the soul done here? Is it courage to write words, to weave tales in black and white, yet still find quiet, unobserved corners in which to cry? An expose of the soul, yet in the shadow of every letter typed I still hide, convincing myself that in the writing alone I am purged, healed, reborn. The strength is fleeting, the empowerment superficial, the passion drained soon after the last word.
Tonight, surrounded by peers, colleagues, business parterns, I stood alone, removed, terrified. In the corner I screamed in the depths of my being because I was silent. Beyond silent, what I felt was a mental paralyses, the painful, debilitating manifestation of perpetual self-doubt. That superficial empowerment I pass off isn't strong enough, doesn't hold back the waves of inadequacy. I am nothing here, in front of you, in front of the mirror. I have no voice, not even the echo of wind. In my mind I sink to the floor, heads in between my knees, defeated not by any proven lack but by my inability to speak, to offer to the world all I know I can share. I choose rather to hide here, to use words as my skin, to find strength in the impersonal.
Debilitating. Not by circumstance or fate. Perhaps it is this, the final blow that crushes me. I am defeated only by myself, by my succumbing to my own fears, my own belief that I do not amount...to what? To a professional? To a writer? To a person?
I lay bare my soul on paper, I look down and see it all, simple, beautiful and devastating in its clarity, but safe to a degree that I will not admit, not to myself, not to you. I pull it out of my mind, my heart, my soul, what eats me, what destroys me, and I present it here. Exhibit A. Impersonal. I've relegated ownership and exhausted stewardship. But tonight, tonight I know the decay continues, the foundation crumbles still, the cracks beyond repair. Against the wall a little more of me withered away and I left it there on the floor, numbed by its loss, moved by the tragedy only enough to write. Only enough to write.
What am I if I fear myself enough to let it starve?
Am I any more of a person? Do I stand apart from everyone else in that room?
No...I am less. Voiceless, silent, hollow.
There is nothing to emulate here.
Words flow still. All of the sadness escapes me, down through my arms, my fingers, onto the keys and buried here in an 2 Pt. Arial headstone. Released, never forgotten, but never fully instilled in the consciousness, too afraid to let those thoughts take lodging. There is danger in that. There is saftey in words, in their shadows, in everything they don't say, in the ambiguity.
She's being poetic, dramatic, she likes hyperbole, she exacerbates the point to the extreme.
Or perhaps she is just sad.
I've convinced myself of a path. But this constant death of the self, and the willingness to abandon it, unburied, unceremoniously, that must speak to some wrong turn, some mistaken sign, some misstep along the way.
On my way back, to the beginning, to find the way I should have turned, I sit here on the rocks and write. And write.
And drain that energy onto the paper.
And lie back on the rocks to stare at the sky thinking only, "Tomorrow...".
Original post date 11-6-06
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