I’m not sure what they reflect, but my distress is alarming. I don’t remember details, but I do remember the devastation. The feeling in the pit of your stomach, the trembling of your hands, the rush of cold winds and fuming flames that wage a war in your neurons…

…the loss. 

I’m not sure what these dreams are made of. How long they will continue, how they will affect my moods or my sleep. It’s slightly frightening but also inspiring.

Maybe my mind is resisting my heart’s urge to fall into darkness again. I often wonder if this is a form of depression of just the skin that we all live in.

Perhaps I’ve always taken heartbreak too passionately. Perhaps I’ve always loved too deeply while keeping a tenacious disconnection between the people I love and myself. Maybe the only reason I am so obsessed with my love for music and my desire to write and perform is because I know that my art will never give up on me. So what happens when I give up on it? I mean, really, isn’t that what I am best at? Leaving?

And that’s a formidable problem-I’m so hung up on nothing working out the way that I envisioned for the future that I’m terrified to live in the now. Because if I focus on today, I might lose sight of later.

But that’s how I used to live-like I could die tomorrow and next week didn’t matter. I used to love with full desire. Fearless, careless, not too serious.

But something changed in me. I don’t know how, when or why, but I do know that my back has never carried so much stress and regret.

I am not unhappy with my life but I do wonder where the time went. And if truth is lost in those hours, how will I ever know if I’m headed in the right direction? Maybe the only direction is clockwise and I need to follow the compass of my heart instead of my eyes.

It’s the 10th day of April and it’s snowing. Much like how on the 10th day of March it was 80 degrees and stunning. It’s no wonder everything feels inside out - our nervous system’s respond to Mother Nature and she’s trying to set something straight. Bending us over backwards to righten our wrongs and fix our mistakes. 

I need to re-wire my brain so that I can let Mother Nature do the work from now on. I’m trying too hard.

I touched the clouds that day. They sank down deep and weaved themselves within me. In, around and throughout my arms, circling my neck and cradling my head, and for a second, I could have sworn that I was floating. Securely wrapped in a blanket of dreariness, I closed my eyes and felt the pain seep out of my pores and into the thick fog that encompassed my body. I knew the clouds would leave me soon - weightless and vulnerable to a world ungracious, but I was fine. Because as soon as they lifted back up into the sky, they’d leak, like one hundred faucets, all of the grief that I had lent them. 

And so they did. As I raised my hands back up to meet them, they wept all of the tears that my heart had buried inside. In fact, it poured for weeks as I stood there and all around me, the buds on the trees bloomed fervently. My eyes grew wide as the weeds that we sowed sprouted into Titan Arums, giant in size. 

Then I remembered, as I stared in wonder at the beauty that surrounded my blundering feet, the simple phrase that the clouds gently whispered to me that day they came down to meet my face:

“She who embraces sadness and pain will someday appreciate the healing of spring rain.”

I’ve been misplacing my anger. Instead of taking it out on my notebook, I’ve been battling in other ways. Instead of letting my boiling blood fuel my pen, I’ve been taking it out on everything else or trying to hold it in.

I can’t do that. I have to embrace my anger and utilize it. 

I don’t believe in “this too shall pass” because the only way to get through something is to push yourself. Perhaps if I believed in God, I would let the outside world guide me - but that’s a false sense of security. Because the world will only guide you to where you will end up naturally - six feet underground. I can’t just let the world lead me to death because as long as I’m breathing, I’m going to reach for something. Complacency and faith are one in the same and I refuse to live lifeless in my body before the earth claims me permanently. 

The only thing we can do is fight. Fight for justice, for freedom, for liberty, equality and for the fucking choice to fight.

I’m tired of sitting still while the wrong people fight the right battles. Or worse, the right people fight the wrong battles. My hands are going to eventually freeze up and all I will have left is my voice. When that is gone, I will be dead. Until then, I have to use every chance that I’ve got to fight the good fight.

…to the girl who could write stanzas and clauses for days and still have something left to say when the pen hit the ground?

What happened to the girl with a head weighted enough, it would actually sink into the pages throughout and at the end of every inanimate day?

The clouds may have been lifeless and resting heavy on her eyelids with regret, but the drama ran vehement on paper. With every loop and dot, her hand made love to the journal pages and she could literally feel her chest stretch as her heart grew fonder of the love she chased after.

I used to be that girl, and perhaps I still am, but I have found that the shifting of the tectonic plates have created crevices for my insanity to escape. Or maybe I am not actually more stable emotionally than I used to be and it’s a great possibility that the conveyor belt beneath our feet has little to do with my inconsistencies, but I can say, with confidence, that I’ve never seen more scribbles and mistakes made on a page of my own.

Nothing seems to fit. Words don’t have a place and puncuation creates only frustration when I can’t find. Just the right…way; to say [how]?? What!

My mind is fucked.

Or not fucked up enough.

I need to dive into this paper. Open up a porthole into this notebook, peel off my ten layers of clothing and apprehension, place my hands above my head and shoot myself off this common plain. 

What would a world of written word look like? Would it only display raw emotion through literal text or would our wordplay manifest into linguistic sex? Would we wrap eachother in chocolate covered euphemisms to sweeten our transgressions? Or maybe we’d create a new progression; a vocabulary vessel with verses vernacular just to show how verbose our verbatim has vecome. Perhaps we would just create our own language. Make up our own words. Use the most uncommon letters in the English articulation zust vor xee vun of vit.

My written world might resemble a little bit of what we call Hell. Where there are seventy-two versions of me and no one else. I could argue with my past while mapping out my future; stitching up new seams just to tear old sutures. All seventy-two of me would climb aboard playground structures - but instead of slides and swings, they’d be late night offerings of confessions and pleas to a God that thirty-three of me doesn’t believe. Another twenty-four would be interchanging doublespeak, rhyming to a rhythm that could never speak eloquently.   Fourteen might be heavily sedated on wine or even whiskey, singing heavy-hearted lyrics and reading politically-loaded poetry in the middle of deserted Wall Street.

But one of me would be still be seated with thirty cups of coffee…writing tales of love and heartbreak to an elevated heartbeat. 

So tell me, what would happen in your written world reality?

So what do people write about at 9am? Do they jot down notes about the morning paper or do they make up shopping lists to work off of later? Do they reflect on late night dreaming or early sunrise glistening? Do they write down prayers to get them through the day or plan out what they’ll say when they are asked to pray at dinner?

Do they start their autobiography or map out a timeline to figure out when their death will be?

Maybe bucket lists of hopes and dreams and wishes for endless possibilities. Perhaps a different kind of list-one that reeks of sadness and grief; reads of regrets and speaks volumes of past mistakes and dreadful pain.

Maybe 9am is different for some. Instead of a new dawn, a new way; it’s the end of a graveyard shifter’s work day. I then wonder, if that’s the case, does dusk and dawn get switched around for the midnight slaves? Does the sunlight bring retrospect while the moonlight breathes life against the night owl’s neck? Does daylight bring a sense of sadness as the night often does for the sunlight goddess?

If so, what do they write about in the dead of the morning? Would they moarn the dark skies that left them high and dry? And if they can’t fall asleep in the sun’s warming reach, what becomes of their mental stability? If Mother Nature created humans to work around the sun’s time rotation, what happens to the deviants who follow the moon’s whispered vibration? Can we adapt to a future of darkness if we’re not nocturnal in essence?

Or does the Mother of mothers put her foot down in our attempt to defy her rules on ground?

Would the night owls one day wake up and realize that the stems of their brains have become confused in their pursuit to fool their need for the radiance of the almighty sun’s heat?

I know that at 9am, in the coldness and bleakness of the winter’s prowess, there is nothing that my skin begs for more than the fervor of summer’s bliss. My toes turn inward, my muscles stiffen, my teeth clench and my circulation slows in preparation for hibernation. 

But we’re not bears, we have work that needs to be done, so it would just be nice if Mother Nature would have equipped us with thicker blood.

…all of my questions at 9am. My mind running rampant before properly caffeinated.

Shrieking sirens wailed and cried while coinciding with laser beams and flashing lights. The spectacle was so enormous, you’d swear the entire town was in flames that night. And so I waited, alone in bed at 3 a.m. with widened eyes and a fervent pen. Thinking up every possibility and envisioning a blaze that could put a forest fire to shame, I shivered and prayed that those deafening sirens did not scream your name.

That’s what Chris Guillebeau says. Choose a side and know why you are choosing it. Also choose an audience. Decide who is a good fit and who is not. 

Lady Gaga constantly talks about how she was bullied for being such an outcast; I understand that marketing now. With that, she’s gained millions of outcasted individuals as fans and they are loyal because they think they can relate. In reality, they can’t. She’s a million dollar pop star with a vast talent in music to boot. She’s extremely hard working, well traveled with superstar access to the world’s most longed after material items, but the most substantial reason she’s not like them is because she has power over them. She doesn’t just set the trends, she magically creates them. Yet these kids relate because she tells them to. She keeps their attention because she demands it. She doesn’t ask, she commands. She’s a strong leader but masks that fact by sharing with the world her insecurities. 

So I asked myself, who is my target audience? 

Teenagers.

I’ve always wanted to publish my journals, adopt a young teen and share with them my experiences so hopefully they can relate and find a way to better their lives. Connect through my music, my lyrics, my poetry…anything. 

Dreamers. Visionaries.

Those who know they have something special but are too stifled by conservative mindsets in a corporate world to let themselves flourish.

The heartbroken.

Those who want so badly to overcome tragedies and monstrosities or just move on from the one who hurt them. 

The hopeless.

But what can I do for them? What can my music possibly do for them?

Inspire. Influence them to find confidence. Motivate them to stay strong. Teach them that anger is okay, but there are ways to convert that negative energy into positive energy. Show them that our world is not perfect or ideal, nor will it ever be, but we are the arms that can make this world work for us.

At least entertain them. Help them to escape for just a brief moment in time.

I hear this question often. In fact, whenever I make a comment about writing, needing to write, “this is the perfect weather to write,” I get this question.

There are a few distinct “ideas” that my writing typically revolves around. Even when I try to veer away from those same melodies, the music makes it’s way right back around to the same original sound. Everyone has a muse. In fact, the deeper I dive into my psyche, the deeper my understanding of why I needed to experience the things that I did. The more I understand the trauma, the more at peace I become with suffering. It’s as if we don’t heal and the pain never subsides, we just grow more accepting to it. We decide (at what point, I still don’t know) to live with it and create with it instead of deny and fight our past.

Maybe this is when we grow.

As many times as I write the same line, it doesn’t change a thing. It will always hurt. My cuts will always bleed and I will always circle back to that same damn misery.

But you know what? When people read your words and say “I know what you mean” it sure makes it easier to find brief comfort and security.

That’s why we write. Not to forget or change the past, but to alleviate it. To give our anguish a chance to breathe, even if just temporary. Rip that band-aid off, air it out, clean it up and then cover it until the time comes to tend to it again.

But these cuts, they’ll never heal. They’ll just be a reflection of the life we lived. So with that, we can either bury our emotions and hold our torment in or we can write our story.

I choose to write.