Wanna know why I don’t write?

It feels too good.

It’s not a dearth of ideas or difficulty wrangling the language.

It’s just too much.

It’s the same reason listening to music is such a painful and transporting experience for me, and why I don’t do it as often as I’d like. Sensory overload. Emotional overload. I’m not equipped to process the feelings that flood me, even when they’re amazing.

From what I’ve seen, most people can cry, or meditate, or punch a wall, fuck a stranger–whatever the hell works in that moment. Or, they just don’t get riled up in the first place. Me? When something’s going on in my heart, I eat half the fridge, freeze up real quiet, watch 18 hours of TV, then pretend like nothing happened, even to myself. But inside, where I don’t want to visit, there’s so much going on.

I’m an artist (er, self-styled). I’m supposed to make art out of this shit, right? So what’s the holdup?

Honestly, a lot of the time I don’t–in the WORST way–have any desire to know what’s going on inside me, let alone do anything about it, say anything about it, or write anything about it. Yet when I do tap into it, crack into it, I feel like a ripe pomegranate ripped open, spilling succulent ruby seeds. It hurts like fuck, but it’s the only time I truly feel like myself, feel like I have something to offer that’s juicy and good and has savor to others in this world.

It’s raw. It’s my blood. It’s my heart and it feels like a song. But that kind of good is scary, you know? Like, I’ll be carried away and lose myself, can’t come down to earth when I need to. Can’t regulate when I need to. Can’t put myself back in the toy box when playtime’s over.

Today I wrote something beautiful. I sat in a pretty blue dress in the window of a coffee shop with the sun at my back and I wrote something real in a way that did its subject justice. A construction worker met my eye as he was doctoring his coffee. He stopped still. He said hello as if he hadn’t meant to. I said hello, and smiled, and turned back to my work, my truth, and knew I was unguarded to the world. I knew I was beautiful.

And I am shaking all over, in the aftermath.