#TattooistDiaries | Embracing the Darkness
When a Writer stops Writing
I opened up my WordPress app today and this is what my stats told me:
It’s been 5 months since my last online Post.
So let me begin by stating the obvious…It has been a while a long while a bloody long while since I posted on my blog. WordPress is kind enough to inform me that it has been 5 months since my last post. So why the deep buzzing of mosquitoes and no posts you may wonder? I could tell you I have been:
swamped ~ overwhelmed ~ stressed ~ burnt-out ~ burnt-through ~ exhausted ~ sick&tired.
All of the above would be true and accurate. But mostly I have been so quiet because I have just been learning to.
Stop holding my breath
and just breathe…
This year has been a tough one filled with more darkness than light, in more ways than one. But the important thing, even in an Annus Horribilis, to remember is that there have been slivers of light. The last 5 months I have been searching for and storing those slivers of light. That is why I have been quiet online. I needed to take a breath and then to breathe out again. Breath by breath.
It got too dark for me to write. So instead of forcing it, I did the unthinkable, and just stopped.
I realised I needed to refocus on myself, get my emotional + physical health on a better footing. I needed time to just learn to breathe again because there have been moments this year when it took all my energy reserves just to breathe.
Chiaroscuro
I could go into a few logical reasons as to why I didn’t want to write but that wouldn’t be quite accurate. The worst thing was that I DID want to write.
But my well was empty.
A perfect storm of events + emotions + health (lack of) = Empty, dried up well of creativity/inspiration/focus.
Things, past things, that I had boxed up and stored in a dank, forgotten basement in my memory crept up out of the darkness and demanded to be dealt with. Where I thought I had been brilliant at compartmentalising I was proven wrong. Because nothing had been thrown away instead the boxes had just been hidden.
But I’m still upright. Bruised, battered and scarred from the Past-become-Present and the Present, kneeling but upright. Ironically enough it has been this WIP – Tattooist – that has forced me to deal with those memory-monsters hidden away in boxes in that dank, forgotten basement. I was feeling claustrophobic because it was in the writing and rewriting of Tattooist that these memory-monsters started creeping out. Tattooist was their siren call. So I did the only thing I could do, I boxed up Tattooist and all the poisonous emotions and I faced down my hungry memory-monsters. I faced them and although they put in more than a good fight, I conquered my inner demons and released those hungry memory-monsters.
That is what I have been doing for most of this year and all of the last five months. I haven’t been writing but I have been healing.
Embrace the darkness
Today there are exactly 6 weeks left of 2015. 42 Days. I won’t lie by saying I’ll miss 2015. I won’t.
But today, with just 6 weeks left of 2015, I embrace my personal Annus Horribilis and I thank it.
I embrace the hungry memory-monsters and I thank them.
I embrace my stalled WIP and thank it.
I embrace my creative claustrophobia and I thank it.
I embrace the dark nights of my soul and thank them.
I look at the reflection in my mirror and I see a woman who is stronger for the struggles and I thank her.
I embrace and thank the girl that stands in this woman’s shadow, a reminder of what hope, joy, optimism and love look like.
So today there are 6 weeks left of 2015. 42 Days.
I have been holding my breath but now I’m breathing again. I’ve exhaled the darkness and I’m inhaling the light. It is time to dust off the creative cobwebs of that dank basement and step into an open space. A space where there is light and where I can breathe without fear, without panic, without doubt, free from the shackles of the past. A space where I can pour the elixir of story back into my soul.
Tattooist calls me again but now I am ready to accept the call not as sirens calling me near treacherous, dangerous rocks but as a lighthouse guiding me back home to the written page.
