Words of wisdom from my past self…

This day several years ago I posted two things that still resonate with me, that I hope might resonate with all of you as well.

The first: It isn’t what you say or do that cuts the deepest, it is what you fail to say and choose not to do. That negative space where something (an action, words, someone’s presence) needs to exist is where pain originates. It becomes a void, a vacuum where nothing can live but wishes and “could have beens.”

That one resonates because I’m still stuck on what could have been in my last therapy, if she had just tried to understand my perspective. If there was even a hint of empathy. There was something missing and we were so caught up in the transference/countertransference that we never found it. We just kept hurting each other until I said, “enough.”

I think all of us knows loss and knows the pain of getting stuck in the could have beens.

The second (on writing/blogging): Writing is succumbing to the will of the idea. Allowing thoughts to escape the confines of the mind, to take shape, and become something material. An organic, living thing, of and not of the author. Writing is not giving birth to an idea, it is having ideas give birth to their creator. It is all an illustrious illusion, a misrepresentation of agency. Mending and making of a mind, not from the mind. Author’s do not create…they wait, they incubate as the words take shape within the mind.

That one I wrote while writing my thesis for graduate school. But now, as I try to blog frequently, it still seems relevant. I often feel as if the words come from some place else, some place “not me.” And, I feel that with each new piece of writing I am reborn. I become a different version of myself because I’ve let the words out. I’ve given myself over to the process. It’s humbling, this writing thing, because so much of it is letting ourselves be carried by the waves of thought and feeling, letting that marinate and become concrete in the form of words.