Vulnerability

There is something about a thunderstorm that rains down a sense of renewal.

There is something even more poignant about that thunderstorm if it occurs after months of drought.

I feel like I've been that grass recently, dried out and crying for the one thing I need to survive. Begging, arms stretched to the sky, for that sense of relief and purpose.

When the sky broke this afternoon, when the thunder rattled the house and the heavy, thick drops of rain splashed through the screen door and onto my feet and the linoleum, I felt myself break as well. 

I'm not sure why I've been so creatively stifled lately. I used to joke (although, looking back, it was one of those jokes that stem from a truthful place) that I couldn't write when my ex-girlfriend and I were together. I remember once standing naked in front of a large window on the twentieth story of a beautiful high rise hotel in Chicago at dawn, starting down at the sleepy people making their walk to get the paper or grab a breakfast croissant, and wishing more than anything else that I could write. Just pen something, jot down something small but meaningful, but feeling so stuck that I felt broken. 

I never understood writer's block until that moment. I had heard people talk about their inability to write, the feeling they had trying to get something (anything!) out but unable to...creatively constipated. Much like trauma or winning the lottery, I thought that only happened to other people. 

Turns out this whole time I've been feeling the same way and too afraid to admit it.

Writing, especially for me, stems from a place of emotional openness and rawness. When I write, I bleed out all my feelings and hopes and dreams and fears, which leaves me feeling incredibly vulnerable. It also leads to me feeling, well, better. 

My thirtieth year is almost over. In a few short months, I will be turning 31. My life is upside-down, backwards and sideways different than it was when I turned 30, in some of the best ways ever. I have a partner who lives up to that term, someone who is actually there for me and supports me and loves me just how I am. I have a daughter getting ready to turn 11 and enter into her last year of elementary school. I have a job that fulfills me and leaves me feeling like I'm in exactly the right place. I'm contemplating losing weight, going to nursing school, getting my shit together after years and years of just letting the cards fall where they may.

None of that is easy. All of that requires my vulnerability, the understanding that I can and might fail and fall and the drive to get right back up. 

Writing is the same way. I always make excuses for why I can't write - no time, no motivation, nothing to say. But maybe, just maybe, having nothing to say is a cover for being afraid to say it.