Imagine the most beautiful flower in all of the garden beginning to open it's tiny little head to absorb the much needed nourishment from the sun. At the last second: "Nope. Just kidding it's not your time to bloom."
Now close your eyes and imagine the melodious sounds of the songbirds as the dawn begins to break the horizon. Just as the first bird begins it's morning prayers of welcome to the new day: "Nope. Just kidding it's not your time to sing."
Imagine being stranded in a desert, parched, thirsty, hallucinating from the heat and fatigue. The sky begins to darken, the wind begins to blow, the thunder begins to rumble, the clouds are banking and then the first drop of rain begins to fall. "Nope. Just kidding: it's not your time to rain little cloud - keep moving."
In all of these scenarios you can feel the anticipation, the excitement, the need for release and then the anguish of this wholly unfair reality crashing down and destroying things. Cruel, don't you think?
Now imagine you've always had something of a love affair with the written word. Your earliest memories are those of being read to by a loving parent or grandparent. Then at the tender age of 3, consumed with a lust for prose, you learn to read so that you are no longer reliant on others to read to you.
As you age, you discover the beauty, the strength, the comfort, the power in capturing your own words on paper. Whether it's a poem, prose, a short story, ramblings in a journal it matters not. What matters is that you have found your passion, your "real" voice and it has a life of it's own. It's powerful. It's overwhelming. It's healing. It's cathartic. It's beautiful.
Perhaps one of the hardest lessons I've learned is about what happens to our gifts when they aren't used.
Sitting in an attorney's office in November 2012, I heard the words that would change me in ways I couldn't fully anticipate. "No writing." Ummm..what? No writing about the accident, your feelings, how it's affected you, nothing. Are you kidding me?!?! "If you write anything, make sure it's purely a factual account, leave yourself and your feelings out of it." Even a personal journal is "discoverable" in a court case. Remember the flower? The bird? The parched desert dweller?
I remember thinking this whole thing had to be a sick joke. First, we deal with the accident - sitting beside my husband's bed in ICU for 4 days, hours away from my kids (the first time ever being away from them), seeing the hulking mass of twisted of metal that (for all intents & purposes) he should have died in, adjusting to everything in our lives being thrown completely upside down and now this? Now you're telling me I can't go hide in a journal somewhere to sort through the jumbled mass of emotions and feelings that I am? I sure as heck can't talk to anyone about this - who else could possibly understand? How else am I supposed to muddle through this?
My petals were plucked. My wings were clipped. My rain never came.
So, as much as I've hated it, I have dutifully done what was expected of me. Don't write about those feelings. And, in turn, ignore them as best as you can. What choice did I have?
Part of that mandated ignorance was holding things in. I can't do it anymore and I've decided I'm not going to. Funny thing though...did you know when you have a gift you don't use, when you go to use it again, it's hard to figure out how? For the first time in my life, I find myself intimidated & silenced by the power of a white screen. And it pisses me off. I want that part of me back, but I don't know if I'll ever get it back in the way it was there before. I hope so, but my confidence is seriously shaken. Think when they finally settle this mess, they can compensate me for that too?
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