I recently found an old bff on facebook. It has been haunting for me because I haven't seen or talked to her in like 18 years. We were extremely close, and then she moved away & we completely lost touch. No mutual friends so I couldn't even ask anyone if they'd heard from her. I totally found her through a google search. Anyway, we've been catching up through email. I haven't written or typed anything so long since I wrote my master's thesis. It just flowed out of me- everything that I've been up to since I last saw her. A lifetime of personal information. I don't keep a diary anymore because I am afraid my descendants will want to jump off a bridge after reading it. No just kidding. Well not really.
It made me kind of realize the source of my writer's block I have been battling for several years. I was less inhibited & had less to protect while in my teens & twenties, so I felt more free to express myself and write heartfelt songs. I think as I grow I step more deeply into a world where self-restraint is the necessary norm, entering a professional, tight-lipped engineering profession where the less I say, the better off everyone fares. Well even after leaving that profession, I carry my residual inhibitions every day, protecting my close network of loving family and friends from my darkness. I don't want people to be sad that I am not necessarily the happy, bubbly person they want to see. I don't want to make my mother worry. I don't want to make other people feel uncomfortable by saying something too profoundly sad or intense. I don't want to scare people away.
But I think that keeping it all in makes it fester inside me, and something ugly wants to rear itself. I need to write. Whether I do it here, or in new songs, or in epic emails to my old friend who knows that dark side of me and isn't afraid of it. I just need to write. Because it sure feels good to get it all off my chest. She said the perfect word that describes this feeling: cathartic.
Through this healing dialogue with my old friend, I am inspired to look to the future, broken, knicked, bruised, bent, bandaged, imperfect, yet wise, practical, realistic, and hopeful. Maybe I can shed some anger and regret while I am at it. Imagine.
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