Falling Through Words

I have many excuses for many things. One of those things is my constant hesitancy to write--write fiction, write in my journal, even write emails. I want words to be perfect. I don't have time. (I have time to read War and Peace in three weeks but not to write). I have nothing to write about. Since I have excused myself from writing for the past six months with relative consistency, I am out of practice and therefore getting back into practice is a betrayal of this guilt of laziness. I never said that my excuses are valid or even make sense.

However, one justification that I rarely verbalize, but often feel, is simply fear--not the fear of having written that so often comes with letting others see your thoughts. Even when I think that no one will see my work, I fear the very process of writing and the feelings that come along with that action that I love, need, and carefully avoid.

When I allow myself to enter that "writing attitude," I automatically disengage myself from my "reality." Like most who consider themselves "writers" or even "artists," I feel disconnected from all of the "normal" people. When I am in story-mode, my senses are heightened. People are not parts of relationships but rather pieces of dialogue, character, or situation. Or worse, they are a stumbling-block to be quickly dealt with and passed over so I can get to the "real" stories that actually only exist inside my own head. Something is being developed and born through the thought and act of writing. Something is coming into my personal cognitive and emotional world that was not there before because I am figuring something out that, momentarily anyway, it seems no one else will ever realize or care about.

I have successfully excused and repressed those awkward stages before; but, when that sudden awareness comes upon me about what I am doing, a similar yet opposite terror remains. I murdered an idea. I could have let that story or essay out, that thought that was itching to get onto paper and into order, even if no one else ever saw it. I strangled a small part of my memory and what might have been a deeper understanding of the world or myself.

I often rediscover the truth of this give and take in autumn. Fall is a drowsy and dreamy season as the world sinks into hibernation. We are alert enough to take note of a sunny but frost-bitten morning. We unknowingly take in the leaves that drip with a cold moisture or burst with dry crunch in a way we have not seen since the last time the summer died. But also in autumn, we slow down while our more internal memories are stimulated.

For me, developing story is not so different from remembering. It is something that takes place within myself--people and events that I replay in my head and rework on the page until they make some sense of my own life or this world I inhabit. Perhaps writing sometimes does make me, as well as others, feel like a sort of ghost in our own world. But when that ghost can observe and think in order to understand and once again interact in a new and changed way, perhaps that fear of leaving momentarily is more than worth overcoming.