I have lots of things to write about but my head is too full to get them all out. Every day this month has been filled with joy and terror and confusion and self-doubt and gratitude and horror, and then my mind is filled up with stories that I need to get onto paper, but they all get jammed together.
It’s like when you were six and you were trying to get money out of your piggy bank, but it didn’t have a stopper so you just turn the glass pig upside down and shake it violently and loudly as each penny drops out of the opening, but then it would get jammed with pennies and you’d have to sneak a knife out of the kitchen to shove it up the thin opening, and it totally worked, but then you wiggle the knife a little too hard and suddenly the glass opening of your piggy bank shatters and you panic and try to put the pieces back together because you instantly realize that the bank was worth way more than all the pennies inside of it, but you slice open your hand on the broken glass, and that’s when your mom realizes it’s gone terribly quiet and she walks in to find you cross-legged, wide-eyed, holding a knife and covered in blood, and she screams “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” as if you might have murdered your little sister, but you explain that your sister is fine and that you just got stabbed by the piggy bank, and that you’re really sorry and will take any punishment she metes out but that “it sort of seems like being stabbed is punishment enough,” and then your mom is like, “JUST PUT THE KNIFE DOWN, JENNY” as if you’re some small, terrible mugger who murdered a pig for a bunch of blood-soaked pennies.
And that’s what my head is like right now. It’s awful and wonderful. And it’s full of blood and stories and (metaphoric) broken glass and far too many run-on sentences. So tonight I’m going to turn my head upside down and shake until things come loose, because sometimes the only thing harder than writing is not writing.
This post has no real point except to say that I’m still here and that one day very soon I will have shaken free the final page of the book inside my head so you can read it. But for now I’m leaving you with a song I listen to when my head gets too overwhelmed and when I need to be reminded that writing is very much like life, in that it is sometimes incredibly hard, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also incredibly worthwhile.
