A Writer's Notebook, Day Four-Hundred-And-Thirty-Seven

Some days, it is hard for me to move away from writing about grief and about the feelings that keep returning.  That is not a bad thing, but it can feel stifling, and after writing a series of poems focused on that emotion, a desire to be able move forward often persists.  Of course, that feeling does not always reach fruition.  It is not simply a choice to turn off a certain emotional mood, or to find something on the other side of it, though one hopes that the point is to progress towards something. 

Today, I had a day where I felt very mired in that kind of mode.  I was writing a great many poems that dealt with negative feelings, particularly those surrounding my sense of loss.  A few verged into other territory, but the tenor was largely the same.  I felt very much that I was stuck in those feelings, and I was not certain how I would be able to move through them.  However, I kept writing.  I did not let go of the place I was in, did not deny how I felt, but wrote about it.  Some of this may be utter trash, and some of it may not be.  Even so, I know that I moved through towards something.  The poems themselves changed, though I did not always expect it.  That is to say, it sometimes felt as if the part of me that is writing had a better grasp of what I am dealing with than I normally do.  I felt the meaning come forward, often in ways I did not expect, and had to trust myself to follow something that I wasn't entirely in control of.

While that sense can come along as a writer, and often is the greatest source of joy in creating a work of fiction, for example (it can be wonderful to have the sense of the characters running off with the story, and just writing based on imagining them interacting within the world), but it is a bit more complicated when it is personal.  Here, it became a matter of trusting myself to follow ideas that I was not entirely ready for, even if they were positive, and which I did not always expect.  I do not know, as I said, if the work itself is of value, but I know that the experience was.

Certainly, one aspect of that value is in the chance to gain certain insights, and I do not mean to dismiss that, but this is not a blog about writing as a form of therapeutics.  I am not dismissing that as valuable, nor denying that my work often has a role in helping me to think through experiences in ways that can be personally relevant and valuable, but it is not the point of the work I am doing here, at this moment.  Instead, I am considering a different aspect of why this experience is meaningful, the value of having such vulnerability and willingness to make discovery on the page.

I think we often pay lip service to that idea, and often we attempt to be vulnerable through personal revelation, admitting that we are flawed or guilty in some way.  These are important efforts, but there is another kind of vulnerability as well, and that is the vulnerability of entering the unknown inside oneself, of allowing personal discovery to occur through the poem, not merely by revealing something personal to others, but by exploring the self honestly in a way that means finding the unexpected and having the courage or willingness to allow that to exist on the page.  It is a very different kind of vulnerability, and one I am not sure I had noticed or even explored before, but I hope it will help me in finding my way to poems that I might never have even thought could exist within me.