Dear Reader,

The rain in Houston today was a chance to do something I hadn’t done in a long time, write something different.

I’m in the middle of a revamp for Jennie Manning. Lots of good stuff there and lots coming from workshopping. But today, I wanted to revisit something I began to write a couple of months ago. I’m not quite sure why. I have a feeling about these things and sometimes it’s about taking out of you something that won’t let you breathe.  

For me, that’s literal. Yesterday I had trouble breathing and needed to sit down for long periods of time. I yearned to write but had no idea what to say.

And then this morning, I knew what I wanted to do. Without planning or scheduling, I opened up the words I started months ago and read the first lines. It was the first time I had read them in months.

Wow! There was gunpowder on the page. I had written them with so much pain in my insides and then put them away because I couldn’t bear it.

Today, I must have been ready to make them into art.

I spent the better part of a rainy and flooding Saturday putting together a non-fiction piece with pieces of research interwoven in it. In addition, I’m using excerpts from my journal from the past year. As I read, I noticed something…I could track the pain in those pages. From the hopefulness to the despair, I could track my pain and unhappiness. I also saw the source of it.

For the first time, I wasn’t afraid to hurt. I wasn’t afraid of the truth in those pages or how I would feel about it now.

The past year, it was painful. More than it needed to be. People are cruel. I wear my heart on my sleeve. I know that more now than I ever have. My poor heart, it was taken advantage of by people unworthy of it. So it bled for a long time.

Today reminded me of how humans are made of elastic. We bounce back. We bend. We don’t break, not completely. Something tethers you to yourself, a version of yourself that allows you to come back. One only needs to look for it, hold on, and hope.

So I wrote and wrote and read through my journal and typed it into this non-fiction piece. A new world for me and I like it.

I don’t know what will become of this piece, but I’m glad I’m writing it, glad that I’m in the thick of it.

Until next time,