I Got Something to Say

For a while now, I've been trying to decide if I am "real" enough in this blog.

I read other people's writing, and it seems to flow and energy drips from it. My writing, to me, feels constructed, constrained, and a little constipated.

Perhaps this is because I know it's in the public domain. But then, so is the work of the folks I read. Other bloggers, other writers. 

People who can dip into their emotional well and come out of it and leave you in tears.

I'm not sure I can do that. I'm not sure I am capable of that. I don't know that anything I've written since I began blogging 20 years ago has ever done that.

There is so much that I don't write about because this is a public space and because I am - or was - a public persona - that I am pretty sure my filters are constantly on high alert.

Even if I don't want them to be.

So if I wanted to rip my heart apart on this blog, and dump all of my grief, my angst, my heartache, I seriously doubt I could. I might want to, but I don't think I could.

I ache to feel like a real woman, a real person, a real human being with emotions and everything, but sometimes I feel more like some androgynous Vulcan, living a life of logic, with my emotions shut off and shut down.

Only then they come flying out at odd times. In strange words with my husband, for example. Perhaps a short snap at a friend. Maybe a huge sigh with another family member.

But I so badly want to write with freedom, with abandonment, to let it all fly out. Even now, I'm trying to do that, sitting here writing, trying to find an emotion to cast outward, and all I find is a lot of broken.

I find the broken in the way I feel physically, while I am still - still - trying to get over this virus or allergy or whatever it is I have. My voice is raspy, my eyes water constantly, my sinuses are all over the place.

There's broken in my soul at the thought of my country falling to pieces right before my eyes. I keep wanting to say, "Not on my watch," but it is my watch and I have failed, as have the multitudes and the many, and yet we all, except those of us who die tonight, will get up tomorrow and it will be just another cold, frigid day in Southwest Virginia, and my beautiful mountains will still pitch up towards the blue sky, and the snow will still be spotty on the grounds, and the deer will slip from the cedar trees and into the glen to munch on frozen grass and the cardinals will fluff themselves up in the tree in the front yard, their bodies enlarged to keep warm as the polar vortex bears down upon us.

There's broken in my heart when I think of all I have not done and will not do, and all that I wanted to do but could not bring myself to do, and then there is regret because I cannot remember what I have done, and I have done a lot, it has been a life well-lived, or as well as I could live it, at any rate, and so what if I don't ever see the pyramids or travel to Ireland? Those are just marks on a map, after all, and life has no roadmap, no life does.

There are those who can bulldoze their way through their life and take and take and get what they want or think they need and many of those people are happy, but most are not, or so it seems to me. And there are people like me who shrink and grow small in order to simply stay safe because safe is security and yet safe is boring and not really secure at all, because it's a nothingness sort of existence to stay safe and secure and holed up, aloof and alone.

I want to find that part of me, that part that I know is in there, that would allow me to write with the freedom of a flag flapping in the breeze - any flag, anywhere - flapping in a wind until it tears into shreds, and no one is even sure what kind of flag it was, in the end. Isn't that the way to get out of this place, to fly straight into the wind, unfettered and free?