How do you find a home in the world when you can't even find a home in your Self?
How does a writer make a home for her work when all she seems capable of is running away?
I have created and destroyed far too many online dwellings for my writing; so many that it's embarrassing. Why can't I settle down? Does it have something to do—a spillover from real life—with spending far too many days waiting for someone to hit the PLAY button?
Why the Internet? Why haven't I written a book? Who's afraid of commitment? Well, I am, of course. I take such things too seriously. If I'm going in, I'm going all in, but if I can't muster the wherewithal for that, I'll tell myself that it's good enough for now. I just have to do it in baby steps: one day now, one day tomorrow, another after that. It works for a while, but eventually, the come-hell-or-high-water slogging just takes too much out of me, because nothing ever gets put back in. With no validation from another human being, it's just me. Again. Alone. I was that child who could play by herself for hours. I had to be, and soon enough I preferred things that way. But trauma responses are not who a person truly IS. They are who a person NEEDED TO BE in order to survive.
Survival mode sucks: spending almost all of 56 years waiting for the other shoe to drop, always being on high alert, scanning the surroundings for danger, constantly protecting yourself from disappointment, derision, and despair takes its toll in so many ways, we don't recognize half of them.
Why Poetic Anatomy? Why another site? Why not The Ruff Draft? Good questions. Why do I keep buying books and trying to read them all at once? What am I looking for? What can I not satisfy? Who made me this way?
Well, I can rattle off a list in answer to that last one, but I won't. Not here. Even when I commit, I need to be careful. There's always another bridge to burn, but I'm still choking on smoke.
Poetic Anatomy: because I had to go back to go forward.
If you do want to stick around, please keep in mind that these are essays. "Essay" means to try. I also ask you to kindly remember that dismantling a life of lies is not a pretty process and you may not like what you see here, but my life is not your life, no matter how hard I tried in the past to make mine look like yours. Oh, and a little something once in a while, just a teeny scrap of evidence that I am not talking only to myself would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Go for it Cheryl! Looking forward to reading what's on your mind...