And so I have done so. Or at least started to. I am not currently at a point, like I was last Fall, where I could write every day, espeically for the type of writing I need to do. It really has to bubble up and force itself out of me. Today was that day. Something about 2023 so far is that I am remembering feelings, or how I felt during certain parts of my life in the past. I unfortunately have learned over the past ten or so years to not just hide my emotions, but to suppress them altogether. Which is unlike me. In my younger years, late teens and early twenties, I was extremely emotional, I truly felt things. I felt anger, happiness, joy, excitment, love. My late twenties and up to the late thirties I have reached (still young!) have taught me just how useful those emotions can be to others, and how they can be used against me…and so I hide (poker face) and suppress.
I’m still not quite sure of my “voice”. I know it will come with time, and I get to it eventually as I write, but I do have a sense of what it is. Style is also something I have struggled with, especially when it comes to writing I plan to publish for the public to read. I want it to be written in a certain way so that it reads in a certain way. It may come across as choppy, but there is a thread woven throughout that connects everything. At least that’s how I see it in my mind. I have notebooks filled with thoughts started. Journal entires of complete thoughts. Scraps of paper, quite literally, kept together with a chicago screw, for a personal essay…I think that’s what it would be considered. Doesn’t matter. But that’s what I really felt pulled to this morning. Those scraps with ideas and feelings written on them. And so I started with the first one. Reading it brought back the same feelings I felt, and so I wrote. I turned to the second one, heavy feelings on that one and so I stopped.
This season of writing for me is going to be hard. Hard because of the closure it will bring, hopefully. Hard because of the work it will require. Hard because I never wanted to write about any of this in the first place.
Years ago I wrote a handwritten book of sorts for a close friend. He was just about to have his first kid and I wanted to share my experience so far with him. I filled a Field Notes notebook, as one does, with very tidy handwritten chapters on life as a dad. I wrote on the cover “On Becoming a Father”. That was the title. I never gave it to him. He now has three children, all girls (God bless him), and has much more experience than I do. And his marriage has remained intact.
When I finished writing it I thought that small booklets like that would be useful for folks to have. Simply written, honest accounts of becoming a husband, becoming a father, becoming an uncle, and so on and so forth. I laugh now at the idea but think it may still have merit, though I may not be the best person to write on becoming a husband, maybe I’ll save that one for last.
My intent was to give my friend an honest heads up to what things might be like. How having a kid will change him, his wife, and their relationship. Advice thrown in for good measure. I’m not sure why the notebook stayed in the back of my nightstand drawer, never making its way to my friend, but something happened that made me hold back…and so I did.
It was good to write this morning. To start chipping away at a larger piece that needs to be out there, out of my head for sure, and to write a bit here.
Thanks for reading, and have a great day :-)
