The cursor, the only blemish on a white computer screen mocking blinks. A reminder of my lacking. A metronome of nothingness. The cattle prod on my searching brain.
It taps my mind, waiting for something. For anything. I hover over the keyboard, wanting to prove my worth to the flashing line. To silence it. To make it go away.
But I know no matter how much I give, it’ll always want more.
Blink.
Blink.
Blink.
My eyes close. I search. I beg. I plead. My mind is locked tight. The combination unknown. The road map of thoughts leading to dead-ends.
Blink.
Blink.
Blink.
Walking away, I turn my back on the monitor. On the blinking cursor, yet it follows me. It’s in my head. Chasing me. I can still see it. I can still feel it. I can hear it.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
It’s hard to think. It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to sift through memories and dig through the past. To express myself. To open myself up.
And that’s the problem.
I’m trying to think of something. To spin the bottle and see where it will point when movement has finished. Sharing what’s inside doesn’t come from the head. It comes from the heart.
And once cracked open and exposed, there’s more emotional blood and than any blank page can hold.
Opening Yourself, Even If Only For Yourself
Love. Fulfillment. Excitement. It’s easy to live in these emotions. To share and to recall. To tell friends and recount to family. The stories become sweeter with age.
Yet these are not the events that propel us. They do not drive us. We do not learn from the success or grow from the accomplishment. While they are the stories we wish we could bask in, it’s not the stories we should always bask in.
Because it’s the hurt, the sorrow, the pain, the failure. These are the events in life that make us who we are. That pushes us forward. That makes us great. And yet it’s human nature to swallow them down. To push them deep into the pits of our soul with the end of an emotional broom. Down far enough to not always be seen. And to not always be learned from.
Digging for the pain, searching for the hurt is hard. When you burn your hand you don’t instinctively put it back in the fire. When your heart is broken you don’t intentionally pull out a hammer and break every piece further.
And yet you need to live amongst the pain, take hold of the pieces, feel them, cry over them. Opening yourself up to this ensures you don’t miss out on the opportunity to grow. When you hold your shattered heart in your hands, fingers brushing over the cracks as you remember what it had been like to be whole, you’ll notice things you never realized. You’ll see where it’s rough, where it’s stronger. You’ll discover new colors and textures and beauties, all of which were always inside of you, you just never had any reason to look. Because you were happy. Nobody looks deeper when they’re happy. It’s up to you to look deeper when you’re sad.
You don’t need to open yourself up for someone. You don’t need to open yourself up to anyone. Unless that anyone, that someone, is yourself.
The world doesn’t need to know what you discover or what you learn. People don’t need to know the feelings of a broken heart. The softness of a weeping mind. But you do, when it’s your own.
And when you open yourself up, when you dig your fingers into the bleeding arteries of your soul, even when you don’t want to, especially when you don’t want to, you’ll learn more about yourself than you ever thought possible.
It doesn’t always happen all at once. Sometimes an event has left you too fragile. All you can do is hold your breath because you know any amount of breeze will send the dust of crushed heart a million ways away from you. So take in and see what you can, you can always come back, because it is always you.
You don’t need to dig for it all. Pain and loss and heartache often can’t be sifted through at once, but instead in single tears or fragments of memories. A single grain of sand, when combined with others, can make a beautiful mural. A single dot of paint can transform into a brilliant work of art when other dots are added.
No grain, nor dot, is insignificant. Because it’s one step closer to your own beautiful work of art.
Just don’t force it down, away from the world.
My Discoveries
It’s not always easy to dip my trembling fingers into my chest and pull out a damaged heart. One that’s been soldered and tied and glued and fastened back together.
Sometimes, the best way for me to open up is to close my eyes, forget the blinking cursor of the computer, and let the umbilical between my hands and my heart, my fingers, and the fiber of my being take hold. I don’t think. My mind only gets in the way if I do.
When I was younger I had several baseball coaches who, when a pitcher would struggle, would say, “don’t aim, just throw.”
In other words, stop thinking about it. Thinking gunks up the gears. It prevents the body from doing what it can do. I found this true when playing the violin. Don’t think, just play. The rest will follow.
And now, I tell myself not to think, just write.
The emotions will come. The hurt and the longing and the lessons and the pain will bleed out. Bleed out onto the page, all while trying to satisfy the cursor.
Always blinking.
Thankfully, life lessons will always be there, pumping out, as long as we open up. Because we’re always discovering. Always searching. Always feeling.
Always bleeding.