Writing Honestly

by Feminam Publicus

(Photo credit: Nuvan Masum Jujuly. Follow him on Flikr @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/nuvan_buet/)

It’s hard to write honestly. Writing forces you to acknowledge your feelings and clearly communicate them, even in circumstances where your brain is a mess of memories constructed into spiderwebs. Writing forces you to recognize the realness of the mess in front of you, and dares you to sort through the mess within. For people like me who escape pain at the mere inclination that pain may be approaching, writing honestly is extremely difficult. The results of an honest piece are often harmful, painful, and excruciatingly difficult. Writing honestly comes with casualties. Writing honestly can also come with rebirth.

I am in the process of healing from an honest piece. I read a piece a some time ago surrounding rage, betrayal and moving forward. The piece was a highly intelligible, highly impacting creative construction, each line equaling a lightening storm, every word zapping into this open, deserted field where a love that was right had abruptly gone wrong. I could feel the fire emanating from each letter, words beating with flames meant to burn the reader. Indeed, the words did burn me. After the first read through, my eyes were blackened into a mess of crisp crumbliness. The realness of the piece — the angst, the agony, the anger — had bolted right through my body to the point where I felt uncomfortable.

I read the piece several times, over and over again, what felt like twice at 8:00 a.m. and three times at 11:00 p.m. I died each time in its fire pit, which isn’t an entirely abnormal experience for the victim of a creative poet’s verbal lashing. How many times have we read through a piece that caused us to look at ourselves? How many times have we found ourselves, uncomfortably staring at printed truth, saying to ourselves, “Oh shit… I do that.” Writing honestly can cause some serious damage. I was set aflame and crumbled.

I started to dissect every sentence, pulling out of the lineup each word, analyzing the meaning and the effect, seeing how it applied to the very architecture that comprised “me.” And after being made tremendously crispy, I looked at my pile of ashes.

After the work of this author has disintegrated my outer exterior, smashed my construction of self, the truth in the writing also revealed a truth in me. Don’t get me wrong, my pride had certainly been burned to black. My interpretation of self had been immediately destroyed upon the sudden consciousness of my public perception, and feeling so rock bottom forced me to rebuild myself again from this pile ash I had been left to.

As any reader who has read a piece that forced a serious sense of inner reflection, they are forced to move forward from there. Readers reconstruct themselves and attempt to start again, another day, mixing their own ashes into the clay of the earth, and using the heat of the author’s words to create bricks. As the clay hardens from this fire, the chemical reactions create a smooth, hardened surface, able to withstand future thousands of degrees of heat.

So I am left here, in the process of creating smooth terracotta, taking these new materials, these new bricks of self, and stacking them tightly, neatly, into a structure — a modern architecture the house my new self — hoping to never feel burned by these pieces and their fires ever again.

That is, until a new article lands in my lap, and the process begins again.