Learning Writing

Writing isn't as excruciating now as it was when I first started, thankfully. I remember last summer, when my palms got so sweaty that I worried about the keyboard, when it took a day to write a couple sentences, broken fragments of ideas. And the visceral pain of letting anyone see what I wrote. That kept me up at night sometimes.

Anxiousness still licks at the bottom of my stomach when I imagine how awful it must be to read my words. And there is the sad fact that years of anxiousness have broken my brain, I have to relearn some basics in writing. Like rehabilitation, therapy, the habit of writing often is building up my atrophied parts.

Over the last month I have noticed a difference. I still feel stupid, a lot, just as I did when it was my turn in the middle of the circle playing 'Brown Girl in the Ring.' I hated that game. I had just moved to Trinidad, and I didn't know how to dance the way the other girls did, wining like they had snake oil on their waist. I played the game but dreaded being chosen, because I was such an awkward dancer - the English girl with the wierd accent. This was in Trinidad, where I'm supposed to be from.

Perhaps I could have learned, but knowing how to do that with my hips is neither here nor there. What I did then, as I do now, is hide on the sidelines, because I didn't know how.

That is the weakness of the perfectionist, hating the process. So now I insist on the process: I write words that I know aren't good enough, thoughts that aren't worthy enough, views that aren't political enough. My mind is mostly fogged by worry, but I think that if I keep writing those won't be as loud, and the ideas will come through.

I hope.

One difficulty I still have is distraction; in a fearful moment it is much easier to walk away. Just like I froze up in the middle of the circle of the game.

There is no reason I should persist in writing, when it is so painful, why can't I just let it go? It is absurd, I suppose, this conviction that I have to get words down on paper.

But, I've made my peace with that. Life is too short to worry about what is more worthy, what else I could be doing. Now that I have decided that though, I lack the skill.

So the ability to express myself well, to find the right words to say what I'm thinking - that will come with time, and practice. I still sweat my way through the 'what if' and regularly should all over myself. But discipline and regularity have taken the edge of fear off. And for that I am thankful.