The Beautiful Agony of Writing

“There is no greater agony than bearing the untold story inside of you.”

Maya Angelou

I stopped writing for six days.  I turned off that part of my brain.  It seems that when I shut down other parts of my brain, the writing part goes with them.  I have only located one power button in my emotional brain, and it controls the creative part as well as other parts.  I can’t really pick and choose what sections I turn off.  I guess that this is why lobotomies don’t work that great. 

On the surface, I didn't feel too great of a loss, but...

I haven’t decided yet if I am a writer or a writer wannabe.  I usually consider myself a wannabe in all of my endeavors.  I think that this assessment protects me from really becoming disappointed if I fail.  

Writer or poser, however, I guess that I feel really sad and empty when I don’t write. 

For a couple of years, I buried that part of my heart so deeply that I didn’t know that I missed it.   With the encouragement of wonderful friends and a committed husband, I located the burial plot and resurrected the writer in me. (Or the wannabe).  The problem with writing is that it also resurrects other parts that I might not want to dig up.  If I am going to really truly write from the heart, it means that I start feeling more emotions and becoming...duh duh duh...authentic.  Authenticity can be terrifying. 

This might be why I took a week off.  I needed a break from the realness of writing. I needed to slip back into the false reality of being shut down. Writing opens up the world to me, and the world hemorrhages all over my keyboard.  And I’m squeamish. Like really squeamish. Like faint-from-clipping-a-fingernail-too-low-squeamish. Writing heightens my awareness to life.  I see the universe through different eyes, and these eyes are willingly open to a greater level of experience than they were before.  This is good and bad.  It is breathtakingly beautiful and devastatingly heartbreaking.  I come face-to-face with glory and eye-to-eye with evil.

So I am faced with a decision.  Do I write or not write? The pen can be a weapon. It can be an instrument of healing.  Can I handle the surgeon’s tools slicing open my heart? There are words that want to flow.  I fear that they will be messy.  Do I dam them or unleash them? Writing is incredibly dangerous.  But so is living, REALLY living.