It’s now mid-August. I want to write, but I haven’t been writing.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. I haven’t been writing as much as I would like to. When I do write, I can’t finish the posts. They just ramble off into nothing.
I’ve been tweeting too, but maybe I’ve been wasting my words in 140 character bursts.
But that’s not even the entirety of it. I’ve been grasping at words for months. They won’t come, at least not in coherent paragraphs.
They’re unformed, ephemeral. When they do come, it’s at the most inopportune times. When I should be working, or when I’m trying to fall asleep (and I’ve been struggling to sleep for months), or when I’m in the car, with both hands on the wheel.
But when I sit down to actually write, the thoughts and ideas are gone like the fog burning off in the morning sun.
The grief seems to be gone, but it feels like everything is upside down at the moment. The questions left behind are immense. I want to ask them here, but I fear the response.
Really, I fear a lot of things. It’s only over the past few weeks I’ve really come to understand why. I made a comment in a post a few years ago about sitting in a little room talking to someone, that sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn’t.
After many hours sitting in a little room talking, which seemed to help a little, at least for a little while, everything suddenly blew apart. I finally saw “it”. The deep well, shrouded in darkness where I’d been burying my anger for so many years. Along with that buried rage, came the memories. The things I’d blocked out for so long; the contexts for memories I did have that floated just out of reach of understanding.
The “why” for all the years of depression.
I’m not sure I should unpack it in public, though. Even in part. I know that some of the players in this drama would rather the past be left there. I know that they’ve changed, and asked forgiveness, and I’ve chosen to forgive them.
There’s my side of the story thought; a story with words like spiritual abuse and manipulation. What that stuff has done to me, and how I work through it. See, it might have started over twenty years ago, and ended nearly a decade ago, but I can finally see the truth in all it’s ugliness, and I’m dealing with the consequences here and now.
The forgiveness hasn’t taken away the anger; at first it felt like the Deepwater Well in the Gulf of Mexico, surging away uncontrollably, while I struggled to stop it from catching alight on the surface and burning everything in it’s path.
Now though, it feels like an oil slick, covering everything in sight with a film that I can’t yet work out how to remove.
I’m determined to get through it, to not let it define my future any more, but I don’t think it’s going to go away on it’s own… that strategy hasn’t worked thus far.
There it is. I sat down to write about not writing, and I ended up writing.