I am broken, my brain is broken, and I can’t write anymore. Words used to drip from my fingertips, drowning me under their weight until I could shake them off like flick flick flick, water words everywhere.
Then: Depression (again), pain (more), medication, brain altering chemicals.
Writing is a muscle and if you cannot flex it, it shrivels until it’s almost dead. Poor wormy grubby thing hiding in the shadows. Coax it out, feed it books, hope it isn’t dead.
Remember the music, it helps.
I make a lot of soap now; it’s soothing. Measure the chemicals. Measure the oils. Mix it together and magic. Chemistry and art smash into each other. Works of beauty.
But a business requires a lot of work – not least of all an owner who only tells the good, who doesn’t complain when coming off anti-depressants breaks her brain over and over again, when the pain medication doesn’t work and everything is hard and tricky and broken.
No.
If you want people to invest in you, you present a front to the world, a shiny beautiful front filled with shiny beautiful things. It’s all good here.
And truly it is, it is really good. Business is good, despite my happiness now seeming tied to how many sales we make in a week (buy more soap, feed my addiction, enable me). Markets – we’re being accepted left right and centre. My calender is filling up and it’s a crazy kind of chaos. A beautiful kind of chaos.
My fingers don’t drip as often anymore and I am too busy to let my soul leak all over the keyboard.
I need writing. Soap soothes me; writing lifts me up, makes me better.
It’s hard though, dripping soul blood everywhere. Sticky tape and string bind me together as I carefully create science every day, lost in the numbers. This + this = that, every single time. Soap isn’t messy or hard or soul destroying when it doesn’t work. Not like writing. Soap isn’t bleeding in public. It doesn’t ask the same things of me.
Maybe that’s the problem.
I read back through my archives and wonder what happened. I used to be amazing. I used to think and write, and poke and prod.
I have three children now and the last one broke my soul a little, PND does a number on a person.
But I’m here, and I’m trying. Feeding that cold wormy part of me I tried to forget about. Indulging the darkness.
I need to write.
