There’s a moment when one is pushed back upon oneself. Forced to encounter something uncomfortable, something we wish wasn’t there. It’s a sticky, painful feeling, like touching an open wound and feeling the sick yellow substance that creeps atop scabs. It’s like turning around suddenly and finding a mirror behind you. Lurking and angry, ready to reveal more than you ever wanted to know.

I try, for the most part, to be comfortable with discomfort. It’s such a weak word, anyway, “comfortable.” A pillow is comfortable. A pair of slippers. A person should never be comfortable. I’m not an armchair or a pair of boots. I’m a spiky thing, with sharp edges and rotten black parts and sweet soft spots and an entire map of love and pain and mess in between.

All that said, I’ve been thinking a lot about writing. When I’m writing, I’m in touch with that messiness, that place that feels familiar, yet foreign. It creates a bulwark for the sudden approach of that awful mirror. That shining thing that pretends to tell the truth, demands so much, and gives so little in return (terrible things, mirrors!).  Writing is a way to lay bricks down, to build, piece by piece, a defense against that shallow reflection. It’s a house I want. My own damn house. A place of bricks and hard work, a place where mirrors are only that—glossy, flat, lifeless mirrors.

Building that house is hard though. And that’s why I’m going to get back to this, to writing. I can’t promise it will be daily, but damn, I hope so. Blogward and upward!