Expression
I’ve lost my love for Writing and I don’t know what to do.
Writing is like someone I was arranged to marry since childhood. And I was ecstatic to have a life partner all lined up for me. The first story I made with Writing was in kindergarden: two chapters (one on each side of a sheet of paper on which I had diligently traced lines) about one of Santa’s elves learning to make glitter through the magic of love and selflessness. My love of reading fueled our relationship. The more I read, the more I got to know Writing, the closer we became. In elementary school I would draw inspiration from dreams or the games I played with my friends, and I would share them with Writing. In middle school, when my life was heavy with the burden of growing personhood, Writing helped me understand who I was and wanted to be. In high school I joined contests I never won, but it didn’t matter, only Writing mattered. I wrote five novels and a short story collection. I started a club and published three anthologies. Writing and I were closer than ever, and our future looked bright.
I was married to Writing at seventeen, when I went to a big fancy school to get my bachelor’s. I knew this would present challenges for us, new responsibilities and expectations. I knew I wouldn’t be able to spend as much time with my Writing either, due to my other scholarly pursuits. We grew distant. I grew bitter. I felt betrayed. Our relationship is broken, and I don’t know how to fix it.
But… writing isn’t a person, is it? It’s an activity. It’s an art. It’s a passion. It’s an expression of myself. It is the self. It is Myself.
When you are very young, and you start to become a person, you begin your relationship with yourself. It looks different from person to person, how you experience the world, how you bring the world into yourself, how you put yourself into the world. You grow and you dream and write the story of your life page by page. And hopefully you get closer and closer to yourself.
But at some point I was distanced from Myself. I stopped doting on Myself, I stopped caring for Myself, I stopped honoring Myself. The world got so big and I lost Myself in it. And my writing suffered. That activity, that art, that passion, that expression, that way of understanding Myself crumbled.
I’ve lost my love for Myself, but I’m finding it piece by piece every day when I honor my thoughts enough to put them on the page.
