On writing

Writing is exhausting sometimes.

There are rare moments when you’re feeling it, and all of the right words spill out of you in a steady, comfortable stream. You type feverishly for what feels like five minutes only to realize that an hour is gone and you’ve satiated pages with thousands of tiny letters.

Most of the time, you have something you want to convey, but no matter how hard you try, the right words and phrases just won’t come. You fiddle with internet thesauri, retype the same sentence over and over hoping something clicks so you can feel that familiar release. You distract yourself with trips to the kitchen for snacks and glasses of water but this thing keeps burning inside your chest without a name. It radiates inside of you like a glowing coal.

By far the most frustrating is when the words come too fast. There’s too much you want to say and your thoughts are performing an assault on you, like machine gun fire. No matter how fast you try to catch them with your hands and your lips, they’re coming out in a rapid fire jumble of broken sentences and incomplete thoughts and everything you want to say feels misunderstood. That’s when you need to walk away and hope that one day those ideas will sort themselves out into something you can hold.

-L