Writing: My Curse and Gift
And different colours of the rainbow
The thumping of my heartbeat, curved nail imprints on the palmer side of my hands, the warning sounds in my eardrums. Chipped beige walls, twelve-year-old me surrounds herself with to calm down. And didn’t I always feel too much?
Red in anger was not red yet a deep bloody maroon. And when the feeling of guilt came, it knocked all eight hours of sleep. Luck was everything good that happened and when loneliness visited the rotten feeling sinked into the most deep parts of my consciousness.
No one would ever understand. Even I couldn’t.
Emotions were spewing out like fireworks without an outlet; I was always overwhelmed. Then on my fourteenth birthday, my father brought home a chestnut colored four hundred-page diary. This was my introduction to journaling. The first few strokes of ink were hesitant, ‘Dear diary’ clichés, yet soon this journal would be hidden inside a shoebox under my bed as one of my most prized possessions. The white pages were sponges, absorbing my spewing emotions and laying them down as beautifully recorded words and sentences. And then beige walls turned to white pages. Shoebox became secret writing accounts and the urge to share what I wrote, what I felt had possessed me.
Writing not only welcomed the heavier feelings, rather cherished them. To feel emotions intensely, to feel every shade of blue in sadness, greens of guilt and reds of anger felt like a curse my whole life. Yet when I wrote, appreciation for my heightened emotions took over.
To have every piece of musical note pumped into my soul, every memory as beautiful as listening to ‘Killing me softly’ for the first time. To have relentless passion for things I love; the thrill, the drive. To feel people’s emotions as my own. To feel every grain of salt in a tear and every crevice of a smile. So I recognize, it’s not only the reds, greens, and blues but also yellows, pinks and purples.
Now when I stand in front of the rumbling waves crashing the flecks of sand, I take a deep breath, inhaling all that I feel. And in admiring a beautiful moon or a sea of stars. In brushing my brother’s hair, or teaching. And when presented with an opportunity and if not, making it just because the memory of how it feels or how it would if I won’t.
But most of all, being a writer. Albeit not a good one; just a writer. And so now the excess emotions in my body flow through my fingers, seep through the ink and distribute themselves among the world. Others feel what I’ve once felt, and then I think, oh what a gift.
