Repetition and Writing

I feel like a scratched record, jumping back over and over, to repeat the same worn-out snatch of song. It's been a week of feeling utterly worthless with my words. A week where I have fought every day to simply write. I've been unfocused and scattered. Pieces of the past are surfacing in new ways and everything in me screams to run. This will kill me. It had to be separated away and buried for me to not lose my sanity or my life as a child. That fear is still there, attached to the surfacing pieces.

Holding those pieces, looking at them, seeing what they have to teach me is an exercise in remembering to breathe. I can taste my fear. I remember how my relief used to taste like the first draw of my morning cigarette. I don't know how relief tastes now. It feels like computer keys under my fingers. It's the ridges in the grip of my pen and the smoothness of my journal's pages. It's touch instead of taste.

Relief comes from jumping in the middle of the fear and writing past the place where I have words. It's not an easy relief to get to. This relief takes hard work and discipline. It's not a quick fix. My impatience often gets in the way, shortly followed by my perfectionism. What I'm holding onto though and pushing through for is that this is a relief that bring life and new growth in it's wake, rather than suffocation and death.

It's easy for me to get caught up in wondering whether I have anything worth saying, wondering if it's worth reading. But that's not why I write. I write because it's in my blood. It's how I heal, it's how I breathe. It's how I focus and sort through myself. I write because it's one of the ways that I see the world.

I have to hold onto that on these days that I feel like I'm repeating myself. I'm repeating to find the next line in the song, I'm repeating to taste the flavour of the phrase. I'm repeating because it's important. I'm repeating so that I can learn the sound of my own voice.