I started writing in October last year, for reasons triggered by a series of events irrelevant enough to be forgotten. Most likely in an attempt to express my own significance. Or to watch my thoughts grow outside of myself for a change, watch them shift and contort into something with a little more perspective than what my mind could offer. And once I began, my words flowed with an ease that I anticipated having had so many experiences that I felt needed to be expressed. Thoughts emerged naturally. Words scrambled out of a mind jumbled and overflowing with stories woven into abstract concepts, words that neatly arranged themselves onto the document in front of me. For the first time, I could visually see what it looked like in the upper confines of my mind. I could see what it meant to navigate the art of living with the craft that I had constructed through years of existing in my brown skin. I could see myself with an authenticity, a simplicity that gave me no pressure to be thought of as profound or magnificent. I was comfortable with the normalcy of my own experience. And from there, I continued.
Writing became my mechanism for processing emotions – emotions that I reveled in neglecting, that I always struggled to accept in their entirety. I had no trouble speaking about my feelings because it always felt like words once spoken, were lost. The spoken word becomes reliant on memory, and memory is too fickle to be a consequential foundation of truth. Writing however, sets experiences in stone. Writing solidifies how I feel about a specific event at a specific moment in time, and those feelings become impossible to ignore. The evidence for them is stubborn, rampant, and demands recognition. The evidence forces me to process an endless gulf of emotional disruption immediately upon expression. Sometimes, I feel a release. As if they’ve served their purpose and now saunter out of my body to wrap themselves around the words on my page – outside of me but forever preserved. And sometimes, they stick to my bones and cling to my skin as if too raw to part.
In this process, I struggle to strike a balance – a balance between saying what I can, what I want, and what is relevant. With each word comes paragraphs meant to explore more context, with every page comes volumes venturing to explain. But there are some reflections that I do not want to share, reflections that I enjoy holding tightly in a place hidden from the naked eye and the wandering mind. I give enough to get my point across, enough to compose the essence of complex thought. But also enough to know that the thought is somehow incomplete. Never enough to boast knowledge, and understanding that certain things are too close to the self to be stated with ease.
Such is the process of sharing – finding a middle ground to express without giving information that not all have the privilege to know. But what I do choose to share welcomes people into my mind. As if in a museum, they can roam and select what they enjoy and what they find abhorrent. They can probe ideas that they disagree with, can prod situations they find amusing. They can take their interpretations of my world and attach their own experiences, their own thoughts and emotions, and use their lenses to decipher. With every piece of information, their lenses magnify, multiply, until they swallow me whole. My experiences are now their assumptions, my memories and opinions theirs to twist and taint and tarnish. They build their own version of my words to somehow explore with me. We walk through the same folds of my pounding brain, and we see different minds splattered on the page. The clarity with which I knew myself becomes clouded under the shadow of lenses too large to boast of actual knowledge. And I find my ideas slipping, as I share less and less and less.
What happens, if I lose the vast arsenal of content that injects my negligible voice into the open? What happens if I fade into the folds of monotony, if my ideas repeat their way into the constant drum of immortality? What happens if I can no longer see myself under the weight of assumptions that I’ve invited to my doorstep?
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