(From Pizdun)

Not a poem, this time. But a nice little piece that I've written when needing to get myself unstuck.

How many times Have you gone For weeks Or months Feeling little to nothing? Unable To so much As cry Nor smile Uninspired Unmotivated Unwilling And how many Of those times Have you done so On purpose? Spent so long Resisting That which is Most natural Because You believed It was something Unseemly Bottling everything Up inside Until you might just Explode What good Is an inkwell Never opened? A pen A brush Never dipped? The plastic tip There to keep The ballpoint From drying out Still on it From the day You bought it Emotion Sensation Experience Should not So easily Be let go To waste Forget living Forget life Being something That happens To bottle it all Is like having Life Simply happen To everyone else To everyone else But you But you You should Uncap it At least once Even if only a drop Were to come out It would be So addicting You will want To pour out The whole bottle Squeeze That tube Of paint As children do Never mind the mess It can be cleaned up And even if All that paint Were to be washed away Every surface Scrubbed Every trace Erased At least then Something was Inspired By something Anything Having done Something Anything As children do With no consideration For today Or tomorrow You will Have been inspired Rather than simply Contained Even if That liquid You’ve been So cautiously Bottling inside Terrifies you You should Find some way Any way To let it out If an experience Inspires nothing Creates nothing Did it happen at all?

One of the hardest parts of writing is allowing yourself to be seen. A lot of writing stays on the surface because vulnerability feels risky. It’s much harder to write something honest enough that someone else might recognize themselves in it. But that’s where the strongest writing usually comes from. 🌟Not perfection. Recognition. That feeling of: “I’ve felt this before.” 👨🏻‍🦳 Ernest Hemingway once said: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” 👨🏻 And C.S. Lewis wrote: “We read to know we are not alone.” Those ideas connect. The writing that stays with people is usually the writing where someone risked being honest. Not necessarily dramatic. Not necessarily autobiographical. Just emotionally true. 🌟 The idea that truth in art often comes from saying the thing people normally avoid saying out loud. Readers can feel that. They can feel when a writer is holding back… and they can feel when they aren’t. That doesn’t mean sharing everything. It just means being willing to go a little deeper than what feels comfortable sometimes. Curious how other people think about this. Do you find vulnerability difficult in your writing?

(excerpt from my book) Love is a drug. And perhaps it is the most terrible of all drugs, because unlike actual drugs, this one won’t kill you. …Usually, at least. It will just rip your soul out from inside of you, tie it into a knot, and beat you up with it until you wish you were dead. And because of that, we keep pursuing it. Because we’re all addicts. ... I’ve loved my children. Both the born and the unborn. Equally, though the latter with much more pain, and the former with a lot more frustration. Somewhere along the way I may have even loved myself for a moment of delirium. But then I met myself. And then, like every love before, I lost myself again. And like every love before, it refuses to die completely. For our addiction, there is no “Lovers Anonymous”.