I'm trying to write letters to several people. Apologies, catch-ups, explanations, reconnections.
Writing used to be the most natural thing in the world to me. I wrote notebooks-full and novels-worth of letters, diaries, lyrics, stories, and poems, throughout my life into my 20s.
The less pleasant my life got, the poorer my wallet, the longer my various biochemical conditions went untreated while material conditions failed to improve to compensate... it got harder and harder to access the free flowing of words.
My own voice. Disgusting to me. Painful. Recriminative. I didn't believe in my own thoughts. Didn't want to write letters because what was the point? Just to tell someone who cares about me how bad I felt? To write another story that turned into self-destruction? To write a song nobody was going to hear?
I miss it. Desperately. Always. But when I start, in any medium besides a vague live journal-style post, it hurts so badly immediately. My heart races, I flood with anger and regret and despair, at all the lost time, at my lost life. It hurts. I can't describe how badly it hurts, and how venomously angry I am that my enjoyment of my own mind has been taken or lost. I truly hate it in here, y'all. And when my voice, my heart, comes out, it is furious. It can't believe this is still going on. That the happy-hearted, creative little kid has turned into a resentful, stymied, old bastard.
... See what I mean?
Anyway, I want to write letters to people I've let down or let go. Not to justify myself, but to explain that they didn't do anything wrong. That it's just me, suffering primarily in silence, confused and lost and hurting, unable to communicate clearly.
I've been accosted too many times for my words. I've written from my heart and had my life literally ruined, harm done, attacked by those who were supposed to care for me. I've also written things that have made other people happy, entertained, informed. Sometimes the same things. I haven't had a stable enough foundation of confidence to withstand the criticism, deserved or not, for a long, long time.
Sara once wondered aloud why she so often fell for emotionally-unavailable men. Meaning me. I said, "I don't know." But in my heart I was screaming, because I wasn't born this way. I was made, damaged, beaten, coerced. The friction of so many meaningless, moneyless days. The insistent and abusive control of my parents, who only loved me when I did exactly what they wanted. The partners who misinterpreted me despite my best efforts, out of their own trauma and suspicion. My naive belief that if I just kept trying to make a connection with someone who was dead-set against me, that a bridge could be formed. A childhood surrounded by friends, family, and people who clapped for my clowning, giving way to an adult life cut off from the world, trying and too-late escaping my family, sweating in rural Georgia for no reason besides literally never having enough money to entertain moving elsewhere under my own velocity.
Anyway. I can write this, and hope that it will give way to writing more directly and constructively to a person, instead of generally to whoever still clicks to this webpage, despite everything. Instead I'll go back to work, where communication is draining my energy, where again for some reason I can't get people to really hear what I'm saying, to believe that I know what I'm talking about, that maybe the reason I seem so strange and threatening is because I do know things they don't, and that I am, as usual, several steps ahead and falling increasingly behind.
I want to believe in my life. In my voice. I don't right now. This is just barking at the window. I'm trying to find my way to myself. I've been trying for almost 20 years.