Wednesday, December 31, 2014

White Picket Fence

Has it really been almost four years since I last entered a post? Amazing. I would have guessed maybe a year and a half had passed from the time of my most recent entry. That leaves two and a half years that have, seemingly, vanished. Poof. I have nothing to prove I even existed during that time span at all. Sure, I have pay vouchers and tax returns and cancelled checks and receipts that would offer a chronology of the minutiae of my life, but, I have nothing that can tell you what I was thinking and feeling. I must not let this lapse of writing occur again.
My New Year's resolution is to write a bit each day. It won't be grand or eloquent and, in fact, it may not even be all that interesting. I want to do this so that I will have some record of the journeys my mind makes. Sometimes it is so difficult to understand what is inside my head. It is such a tangled mess. I begin 2015 occupied in a search for my self. I don't know when I became such a stranger to me, but I can't really recognize myself anymore. Maybe writing will help me to sort things out.
Long ago I should have taken my mom's advice: "Get yourself a notebook and just put all your thoughts and feelings on paper." Somehow she knew that I needed to express something unspeakable--e.g., that I really didn't want to be a part of this world anymore. I mean, really, how can one say to one's mother "I want to die."?  But she sensed the poisonous sadness that shrivels my soul. So, here I am, finally doing  what I should have been doing all along: writing. And I'm not just writing, but I'm writing about how I feel, because for some reason, I cannot say the words. Truthfully, it is impossible for me to verbalize my emotions. I can't even imagine saying the words. I don't think my lips and tongue would cooperate. But, I can write.
This is very scary because I really have no idea what this process might dislodge. I have hidden away emotions and reactions and impressions that I just didn't know how to deal with when they originated. Right now I just feel sad. I don't know where this sadness is coming from--it just wells up and spills out of me, literally. I actually wake up at night and find that I have been crying in my sleep. How is that even possible? I've tried to trace the source of the tears the way an explorer might search for the headwaters of a stream, but I can never quite manage to find it. It feels as though I will never run out of tears--no matter how much I cry the tears just keep coming in an inexhaustible supply. I'm thinking that for each tear I shed, a tiny bit of space is opened up in my soul that allows "seeds" of sadness to develop and mature. Apparently I have been stockpiling sadness "seeds" for some time.