writing amnesia

I sit in my bed surrounded by books geared at inspiring and nurturing the creative mind. You know, the mind I believe I’ve lost in the abyss of adulthood. Sometimes, I feel like a Neverland rejectee, sent back to the real world forced to grow up without the gift of remaining young and full of magic. My heart used to speak to me. When a song came on that strung together words that just resonated, my heart would swell and gush. When I reached the last page of a book and allowed a tear to escape my eye. The satisfaction deeply rooted in my heart would tell me that the three hours on my couch were worth it. I lived and breathed everything a creative could: music, words, pictures, anything and everything that evoked feeling. Anything and everything that kept my heart talking, kept my heart feeling. It only takes one bad apple to spoil the barrel. Doubt that led to indifference, that’s what led my heart to stop speaking. That’s how I lost my voice. That’s when the music faded and the magic disappeared. 

It’s my first experience of being a creative not creating. A person who can no longer  see the world in color and who no longer feels the world with ever fiber of his/her being. I’ve become a person who thought becoming a writer was far fetched. I stopped listening to my heart. I silenced it, and a life of color became a monotonous stream of gray. Unable to feel music, unable to resonate with words on a page, unable to talk to myself. I’ve floated through this stream unable to understand myself. It was like I went to bed myself one night and woke up in a body that looked like someone I should know, but I had no idea who she was. I’m still trying to figure that out. Figure out who she is, what she wants, where she went, and why I can’t seem to get ahold on it. Why I can’t seem to recognize her. She is me, but I have no idea who that is anymore. I have a bit of writing amnesia. It feels vaguely familiar but I can’t quite remember how. 

It’s funny because so many people, over the last year of not knowing who stands before me in the fingerprint painted mirror built into my bathroom door, tell me to just write through the rut. But how can you write through something when you don’t have have a voice and when words don’t even look like words anymore. When the very things that made Kierstin, a writer, have become foreign objects in my hands.  

If we are going to be completely honest here, this is the year that absolutely nothing has made sense. I think I’ve made more strange decisions this year than any in my past. I played it safe this year, I fell into that line of life. I became everything I swore I would never become. That’s usually how it goes right? You fight against the force until it eventually consumes you. Then you’re consumed, and its hard to find your way out of the belly of a beast. Normalcy has always been the beast I slain daily. I wanted nothing to do with the idea of a normal life, well normal in my sense of the term, I wanted to be extraordinary. I wanted to move mountains and write words that brought another hope in a seemingly hopeless situation. I wrote for all the other Kierstin’s in the world, not by name, but by heart. I wrote for all those who felt like their voice was too low to be heard. I wrote to discover, to reflect, to guide. I wrote to understand myself. I wrote so that you reading this could maybe understand a little more of your own self. I wrote because writing to me was like breathing.

For the last year I’ve been short of breath. I’ve been confused. I’ve been lost and I’ve forgotten.

But thats the thing with amnesia, right? You forget, and sometimes if you’re lucky, really lucky…

You start to remember.