The Bravery of Writing Poorly

I have a love affair with words. I walk around daily, filled with unfinished sentences and adjectives looking for their place in the world.

When I was younger, I sometimes wished I could dress myself in words, or hang them from the ceiling so I could move amongst them and touch them and see how they would ripple in the wind.

There was a time when I could compose an entire poem in my head before breakfast. Those are the poems who taught me who I was and what I held important as a human. They’re the ones I can still recite by heart today.

Walking is a great catalytic for allowing words to rise up from the depths and reintroduce themselves in new ways. My entire trek across the Meseta in Spain was an excavation of my Old Testament English.

I like the way my words combine and get to know each other when I travel in that way. My words are what solidify my memories and give them a shape, more so than the sounds and scents of cities.

Photos do that too, but it is the stories I tell myself about the photos which imbues them with colour and meaning.

At home, I don’t write. Not formally. Not something I’d let other people read, anyway. Not anymore. When I’m not too distracted, I’m lacking the energy. Besides, my thoughts are repetitive and mundane, numbed by all the hours I waste scrolling through my phone. The Pandemic and the isolation have made it worse.

At home, writing remains forever number 1 on the resolutions list. I’m congested with all the words that have nowhere to go, the words I keep trapped inside me. To wildly paraphrase David Whyte, who also have love affairs with words; if the flame of one’s inspiration is not allowed to burn freely, the soul will be obscured by the resultant dense smoke.

I think that happened to me. My words became covered in smoke and weighed down by soot, so now my writing hardly ever soars anymore. It doesn’t discover the essence of cities or glean meaning from statues or the allies in my garden.

There’s no more treatises on Freedom. There’s a bit of repetitive complaining in my journal, some half written and derivative drafts spread across numerous devices. I hardly even post on social media anymore.

There’s disappointment. An apathy. Some shame. Sometimes I’m judgmental of my pitch or my tone. Sometimes I just bore myself.

That part is the hardest- feeling ashamed of words I choose and how I string them together, of which ones I allow out and which ones I coop up to sink to the bottom and disintegrate.

All these impositions make it harder for the words to live. It’s restrictive. It impairs not only my writing, but also my sense of being alive.

So I’m going to follow the poet’s advice and practice the art of not writing. Instead, I will merely be taking notes on Life.