Lines About What I Don't Wanna Write About

Writing can be a double edged sword. It pours your guts onto the page, cathartically unleashing what you need to let go of. However. It can also grant life to those words.

And what if you no longer wish to give those lines such life? Such power and fuel. What then?

***

I’m consciously choosing to no longer give meticulous attention and analysis to past endeavors. It happened. I dealt. I cried. I was scared. I was anxious. I may still be anxious. 

But it stops here. 

I don’t need the written word, my inevitable go-to outlet for expression, to exacerbate what I ought to extinguish. What I’m finally ready to release. 

***

I was going to eventually summon up the courage to write about a serious illness I once had, and how post-traumatic stress has manifested in various ways.

But lately, I realized that, you know what, I don’t really want to give my anxiety more life. I want to purge it out of my system. I want to obliterate the free-floating stress. 

Au revoir, so they say.

***

It’s funny. I experimented with a meditation class last night, hoping to clear my mind, relax my body, trust my body. Ironically, the guided meditation, the thoughts he put out into the air, some regarding the past, some centering around general self-awareness — thoughts  I already contemplate and reflect upon — left me more inside my head than I was before I left the house.

It was Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State who said that if you can’t laugh at yourself, life is going to seem a whole lot longer than you’d like. Well. Yeah.

***

Buck the fuck up, he told me.

The past is over. You’re not that girl anymore. Be remembered for surviving it; get attention that way. 

***

Remember your strengths, she told me.

Your core.

***

I think I will. Because that’s what needs my nourishment. 

That’s what needs life.

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