Blood Letting

NaBloPoMo November 2012 ~ Tell us your favorite quotation and why.

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”~Ernest Hemingway 

This is what writing has come to mean for me. Yes, I write for posterity. Yes, I write for advocacy. Yes, I write to keep you up to date. When it comes down to brass tacks, I write for me.

I write to hear my voice. I write to purge my heart, to bare my soul, to share a piece of me. What a better way to describe this very vulnerable and personal act than as a blood letting. My writing has coagulated. It is thick, sticky and scabbed over. I pick at it from time-to-time. It itches and I am desperate to pull back that scab and let the fresh blood flow.

I am afraid, though. I'm afraid of the mess it will create. I'm afraid that it will smear all over you and stain everything it touches. I'm afraid that when I see you in person, you will recoil upon remembering my words.

I'm no longer living out loud in isolation. My world is no longer confined to a hospital room, a clinic visit, a home with four walls. I'm branching out into the great beyond. Taking risks and stretching myself into the world of flesh and blood people. My courage now needs to grow larger to match my real life reach. I'm no longer safe behind the digital screen. My vulnerability is very much alive, but I need courage to let it flow. I need strength, too. Strength to handle the emotions, expressions and conversations that come from the words that spill from these fingertips. I know you are reading these words and we will cross paths, in flesh and blood. I want to invite you to the places I dwell.

I am learning how to live a life that can have commitments, while keeping the spirit of impermanence. Making plans, keeping a calendar that is not filled only with doctors appointments. Trying not to slip too much in either direction. Too much planning and I fear I will easily succumb to The Daily Grind. Living planned activity to planned activity. Not enough commitments and I fear free falling into nothingness. With nothing to tether me to the thing called living and finding myself just trying to survive each day.

The idea that I am trying to express is ethereal. I want to keep the wonderment and awe that I find myself in these days. I want to constantly and consistently remember that THIS moment is what matters. THIS moment is perfection. Even if it is filled with pain and suffering, THIS moment is the one that counts. I can get lost in this, though. So lost that I have not done any living. I have also found that it makes people uncomfortable. It takes people out of their comfort zones. It brings to light how much of our lives are lived on auto-pilot. Just doing enough to get by. I do not want to return to living in that fashion.

Consistent writing could possibly be my lynch pin between a planned life and one of impermanence.

Which means, I continue to bleed.


I got this.
~MindiTheMagnificent