Writing

Writing: ten minutes: go …

I write to express myself. I write to understand what I'm feeling. I write to describe my life to me and others. The more I write the more I understand about writing. Sometimes I get writer's block. Quite often these days. I start to think of something I want to write about and when I sit down to write nothing comes out of my brain or my fingers if I'm typing. I love writing by hand because I feel like the feelings and ideas flow more easily. Somehow writing by hand conjures up memories that surprise me. I remember that when I was young I would play out my dreams and feelings with small dolls that I had collected along the way. And then when I was about fifteen and sixteen I started to write down fanciful and fantastical stories usually about me being some kind of heroine. Once I wrote about how I parachuted into Germany during the second world war and saved a whole bunch of Jews from perishing in gas chambers. I always admired Joan of Arc and Mother Theresa. I wanted to be someone who was completely courageous and not afraid to sacrifice herself in the service of others. I have always admired people who do brave and challenging social justice work, and wished I had much more courage. When I was a young adult I yearned to become a nun even though I grew up in a Jewish household where all the adults were atheists. There was something courageous about being a woman who did not need to find a man to save her and take care of her. Just to be self sufficient and know what she wanted. I wanted to be like that. But that never happened. When I write I feel powerful and sometimes worry that I say too much of everything that I feel. My truth seems to have hurt others in the past. My truth I define as validating my feelings around experiences I was involved in. We all experience a similar incident in different ways because of our different life experiences growing up. Ten minutes is a long time to be writing about writing. I realize as I do this exercise that I kind of need to write each day even for just 10 minutes at a time and see where my thoughts, feelings and memories take me. I have often found that after I write about something that is challenging emotionally, at the end of it I discover I am hoarse – almost as if I have been talking for a long time – or perhaps it is because I feel that when I say what I'm feeling, I experience it as making too much noise, taking up too much space, equivalent to shouting. I used to get hoarse after singing with my guitar in a coffee house or around the fire at camp when I was young. Self expression apparently is dangerous for me in some way. I know that my mother really did not like it when I was self expressive about my needs or desires, hurt feelings or simply my opinion. She would become enraged and deeply hurt by me and tell me I was destroying her. That scared me to the core. Most especially because I could not seem to say sorry enough to heal the hurt I had allegedly caused her. When I was a child I would leave notes lying around the house apologizing for what I had done. She did not acknowledge them and I felt at such a loss – such a failure – like such a bad person for hurting her so badly.

This hurts. And thankfully I hear the timer beeping.

10 minutes are up and I have written about writing.