Journaling ( out of Domestc Violence)

“I decided to start anew,

to strip away

what I had been taught”

        Georgia O’Keefe

Someone said to me today, that writing is a solitary assignment, as much as it is a solitary pleasure. Having thought about that all day, I have to now admit, yes, it is. The solitary part of it, is what leads to my thought, what lends to me my ear in hearing my own inner voice, what takes me to places I have never been, what gives me the hope of places I will one day travel, what gives me the confidence in having just enough edge to paint a picture using words, to describe the man sitting across from me on the train as I watch him breath. 

The solitary pleasure is what I find in the silence of morning, when the only sound is the tapping of my keyboard and the clanking of my coffee cup. It is the sterility of first thoughts that get put to paper, my pen, the pill I now take to make the world right. So yes, solitary is part of being a writer, or at least it is, for a writer like me. All the non-solitary time is where I find the seeds in life to plant, grow and write about. It is amazing how many seeds we each could find already stored up inside of each of us, thoughts just yearning to be written down in black ink.

I was sitting on a beach, when first struck by a flash of genius. Journal and pen in hand, scratching out raw pain, sadness, hope, joy, a plan, a path, an execution for that plan, guided by a seagull purging on lunch droppings, as he eyed me in puzzled stare. Legitimizing my hope that I might someday, actually, reach my destination, through the dark storm clouds which gathered like an angry mob, the clouds which reminded me of how long I had stayed in the weeds before being pelted by hail and delivered into a landscape that grew green and lush again, until it opened to a broad expanse of writing. 

     Writing is what happened when I was trying to escape from something else, taking me far away from any point in my life, transporting me into a farthest place than where I started. Every road that led me to detour, a dead end, and in my life, turns out, there where a lot of those roads, because they now compile a series of essays. As opposed to the writer who sits steeped in stare, lost without words, I have endless dialogue, the story, my story, hasn't always been an easy one, but it is my story, and it is what it is, so that others may learn from me.