On Not Writing

I don't know how to write anymore. 

I don't know how to write under the crushing weight of a normal life. The mornings and the nights, the way they blend together in this tiny apartment. The steady love and the simple pleasures. I don't know how to write without the fear, the search, the jet-lagged brain.

When I lived abroad, I was a live wire. I was a force, I was one wrong step away from danger, I was a fearless young thing who crawled up temples at sunset and swam with sharks. I was living out my deepest fears and greatest wishes and I was proud of it all. I wrote because I had to. Because I had emerged from the darkness of my early 20s into some sort of fairy tale, out from under the waves of doubt. I wrote because I had something to say. 

In college, even as I waded through the muddled sludge of my mental illness, I remembered how to write. I remembered how to share my stories as I basked in the glory of my days at Letterman, as I learned how to swallow heartbreak like a carefully positioned knife, as I spent my summers riding bumpy buses through Africa, as I cried and cried and wrote until I thought my words might somehow fix me. I knew how to write because I knew what it felt like to be silenced. I wrote to keep my heart from breaking. 

I've forgotten how to write and it eats at me. The half-finished journals and the folds in pages where I stopped scrawling mid-sentence. The encouragement and the doubt. The acknowledgment that I am here -- that I am 25 and I am alive, but I am not where I thought I would be. The anger and the happiness. The contentment that I confuse with boredom. The clipped wings and the wasted hours. The love and the luck and the waiting game. 

Sometimes I feel like a broken promise to myself. 

I don't know how to write anymore, but here I am. It's 4:45 AM and I am writing. I am lost in the heaviness of growth, the way we grow up and out and somehow manage to feel smaller. But I am still the sum of the people I was before. The anxious child and the woman who wasted her grief. The cikgu and the student and the intern and the lover and the patient and the friend. 

I want to remember how to marvel at mundanity. Maybe I never knew how. I want to make peace with the temporary calm and clear away its stifling force. I want to be creative in the strange times and the easy ones, in the valleys that aren't so low.

There are days to write about. There are stories I haven't told. There is work to be done.

There are words to say.