Sitting In Your Mess
Sitting in Your Mess
Finding the words to describe your season
by Taylor May
My fingers keep finding their way to the backspace button. What you’re reading now is most definitely not what I started with. The pieces of scattered thoughts lie in wreckage, in fragments of paragraphs on the page … waiting to be pieced together, waiting for cohesion to move its way through and make a melody out of the mess. I yearn for cohesiveness, for the scattered thoughts in my mind to come together in a beautiful, relatable form on this blank, white slate. But it’s not that simple. My thoughts and the words that follow them are chaotic, unkempt, a Polluck in a primrose garden.
Poetry would suit me if I had the patience. But poetry doesn’t need patience, does it? It’s a chunk of words made up of lines that, at first glance, don’t make much sense. They don’t need to make sense to move us, do they? We read last lines, we close books surprised to find our laps wet with tears, our bellies sore with laughter. We don’t know how we got there. The lines don’t need to make sense, they just need to make us dance.
Words are beautiful. They’re the thousands that the pictures are worth. They can say so much with so very little. They take us to places we’ve never been before, they build cryptic mansions, royal castles, enchanting forests, and lives of the kind of people that live wild adventures and fantastic fairy tales.
The way writers can string together a series of words, the same words we all use every day, and make them into something magical, has always moved me. It’s why I write, why I search the cores of my being for the perfect words to say. The picture is worth the words, and what we do with the words is of the utmost importance.
When I was a small kid, I dreamed of being a writer … of using these kinds of words to tell these kinds of stories. But as I grew up, and started paying more attention in English classes, such an occupation no longer seemed so glamorous. As I read more I learned that good stories don’t often come from simple lives. Most writers I’d read from had found their words from heartache, from trauma, from brokenness. The best stories were the ones that bled with tortured truth. It was from those places that hope arose.
That terrifies me. I spend a lot of my days talking myself into doing hard things, things outside of my comfort zone … many times avoiding them altogether, brewing a cup of tea and turning on some escapist form of entertainment. But writing, writing forces you to sit in your hurt, to dwell there, process it. The words on the page are like tasting, seeing, hearing it all over again.
But writing, writing forces you to sit in your hurt, to dwell there, process it. The words on the page are like tasting, seeing, hearing it all over again.
Words can heal. But healing doesn’t always come so swiftly. I find myself all too often deleting a long Instagram caption after getting stuck and caught up in my feelings and replacing it with a quippy one-liner and a star emoji. It’s easier that way. It’s easier if I don’t confront the pain ... if I save it for a later day.
I get caught up, like writer’s block, like a hairball in a cat’s throat. The hurt, the confusion, is the alarm telling my body something’s not right. And too often I don’t know how to let it pass. So I move on to the next thing, doing that until confusion settles in again. I always have a bundle of drafts going, waiting for the moment I’m able to confront whatever reality I’m processing, whatever feeling I’m attempting to feel, attempting to explain. Writing is vulnerable … uncomfortable sometimes. It’s not arithmetic, two plus two doesn’t always equal four. It takes time, it takes coming back again and again. Cutting, pasting, cutting pasting. Deleting, adding, deleting, adding. And it never goes away. It’s there for the world to peek into.
But writers do themselves a disservice if they don’t dive deep into the places where they feel the most. They sell themselves short if they end the sentence before a thought is finished. A writer’s occupation is to invite the world into their hearts, their minds and
Jesus couldn’t have risen without first confronting the grave.
Writers, you have a vocation, a great calling from the great Author Himself, to tell your story. When your hurt makes its way through your soul and onto the page, you help another to find healing themselves. When your story lingers, you bring hope to fractured hearts. Find the words to match your pain, to tell your story. Sit a while in your mess. What did you feel? How fast did your heart beat? Did you hear the cars outside or the neighbors next door? What did your tears taste like as they fell past your mouth?
Sit down with your thoughts, sit down in your mess, and find the words, the beautiful words.