Self-Reflective Musings of the Museless

There are days when I’m reminded of the gentle power that resides deep within me, something I’ve buried and hidden and patted down with enough force to cause a shudder of disgust and relief in me.  There are days when words come so easily that I’m puzzled as to why I can no longer deal with them on a daily basis.  There are moments, like these, in which I want nothing more than to weave, knit and spin out yards and yards of unpolished work, in which I know that there is a conclusion to whatever thread I’m holding.

I have always been good with words, and there was a time when I neither denied nor hid it.  I took pride in being able to take an idea germinating in my head and render it onto a piece of paper, leaving my reader breathless.  I know that there is a reason that, since I’ve been able to pick up a pencil and put it to paper, people have encouraged me and prodded me and driven me to display my talents to a wider audience, a wiser audience.  I once sought to push out of me as many words as possible.  It was a metaphorical birth – I was giving light to something that had grown inside of me, and I was proud.

I have talent when it comes to words, and not just only in the academic sense.  I can see profound meanings in works, yes, and I can compare and contrast them with others until I’m blue in the face; I can spell that out for people and easily convince them of what I’m saying in my work.  But living within me, still buried, is the ability to take words and connect them into writings that’s meaningful and touching and driven, and yet not academic.  I’ve hidden it so well, though, that getting it back has been frustrating, filled with countless dead ends.  It is the kind of frustrating that makes me want to gnash my teeth and punch a wall.  There is so, so much within me that I want to release, but can’t.  It’s my own doing, and I fully accept that blame; in mending it, though, I’ve come to an impasse.  I feel as if I’m at a crossroads, and the only thing left to do in order to save my talent is to draw a pentagram and conjure up Marlowe’s Mephistopheles.

I am not doing what I could be doing.  I am not doing what I should be doing.  Yet, I cannot figure out a way to do what I could and should be doing.  The world today doesn’t permit that.  Maybe it never has, and maybe it’s my task to make it work like so many poets and playwrights and novelists have before me.  But the fear of the unknown, the fear of losing out on other things I also want to experience, that also keep me from advancing.  I am so tired of being fretful, of treading safely, of being unable to unleash my talents even when I want to.  I am so tired of worrying that allowing myself to do so will cause me to lose other things I want.  I am so tired of avoiding choice. yet I cannot force myself to start pondering any choices I might have, whatever they may be.  As of this moment, I don’t even know what choices there are.

The biggest problem is that I don’t know how I want to unleash my talents.  Part of that stems from not beginning.  Yet that reaches farther back into being fearful to begin.

I have gotten through this entry without misspelling one word.  That is how I know that I’m writing seriously, with heartfelt emotion and searing numbness.  It is in these moments that I respect words so much that even one misspelling is too great of an offense.  There is too much magic in each and every one of these collections of letters to risk degradation of any sort, even if it is accidental and a product of stream of thought.

Now that this has all spilled out and is in the public domain, perhaps it’ll force me to begin the investigations into which avenue I need to take.  Which of the  roads in my crossroads I need to follow.  It’s not an option, selling my soul for the use of the inborn talent that I have; I cannot exchange for what I already know I have.  I can only step out of the center and choose a merry way.

There is no assurance that it’ll be merry.  At least it will be a way.