Empty Space

I’ve had a weird feeling the last week or so, and there was nothing much I could attribute it to. It was a mix of nausea, exhaustion, a stomachache and an overall tiredness. It was at once a mental tiredness, an emotional wailing and a physical pain. It was all these things, and yet there was nothing much I could pin it on. I wrote about it, thought about it, ruminated on it, changed the diet around it, tried to walk it out and couldn’t get myself to cry about it.

And then it came to me: it was an emptiness. 

I’ve tried to write this blog post three times, and it hasn’t come out until now. This is unusual for me – usually I come up with an idea, toy with it a couple days, and write it in one fell swoop. My last post felt more like pulling teeth than writing, and this one is also not coming as easily as they usually do. The difference, I think, is that suddenly, out of nowhere, I’ve finished writing about what used to hurt me as if it defines me. 

A couple years ago, I wrote a post called “I Used To Be Funny,” about a shift from writing self-deprecating emails about traipsing through the world one mishap at a time into needing to take myself more seriously and writing about what I really thought and felt. Even sometimes when I wanted to write something funny, all that would come out is what you will find on my blog: deep introspection over what has made me tick, made me cry, and made me into the person that I am today.

But here’s what happened: nothing. Nothing happened, except that I had a conversation with someone who had gone through a lot more pain than I had, pain I couldn’t directly identify with because our lives are very different, and I realized that I didn’t want to engage this person based on our pain. Whereas usually I would listen to them and then break in with a similar way that I had hurt, I found that suddenly it wasn’t that I didn’t care to hear what he said, but I didn’t want to share it with him, or step into times in my life where I had felt the same way so that I could understand what he was going through. I found the thought of continuing the conversation as it was exhausting, so I changed the subject to something lighter. In doing so, I realized that suddenly, it wasn’t so important anymore: my past, the scars that I bear, the hurts I have suffered and the people who have suffered with me. Suddenly I realized that where there was once a need to explain myself in terms of my past and ruminate on it, today there is simply a desire to move forward, into whatever is waiting for me in the empty space when my need to explore what brought me here is gone.

Eleven months ago today, I arrived in Panama. I wrote a blogpost not long after defending my need to come here, explaining that I was not escaping my problems, rather bringing them with me so that I could look them over, one by one, and try to understand what they had to tell me. Obviously this is a work that is never done, but it seems that the specific hurts that I brought with me have now all made it through the line and are gone. I have looked up from my work and realized that I’ve done it: for now, and perhaps for a little while longer, my past can be safely tucked away in the past where it belongs, and I can now look forward into the future to see where I’m going after having determined with greater clarity what made me into me and who I am because of it, even if I no longer need to define myself by that information. 

It’s a little scary. I’m not sure what it will look like. The words don’t seem to come as easily here, not yet anyway, but I’m sure the more time I give this space, the more it will reveal itself to me in terms of who I want to be when I have put down all the expectations, taken away all my limitations, and moved on from what has held me back for so long. It’s a vast and echoing empty space, but it doesn’t have to be a scary one. There’s all sorts of room for growth here: for new relationships that celebrate this new person, for more time spent in the moment instead of reliving past moments, for continuing to feel lucky for the existence I have created here, not just as a shelter to weather an emotional storm, but as a place to enjoy the newfound person I have become. It’s been a rough journey, but an important one, and I’m ready for the next step: ready to explore this new empty space.

Love and vast empty space kisses

Morgan

Writing 101: What's I've learned in 101 Blog Posts

Last week I wrote a blog post without realizing it was the 100^th blog post I had written on Confessions of a Travel Addict. Although I mentioned the big 100 when I posted it on Facebook, in no other way did I bring attention to it in the blog itself. I’ve been thinking about it some, however, and as much as I am not where I thought I would be when I first started the blog four years ago, I have nevertheless discovered many things, especially about writing. So, in honor of my 100 blog posts before this one, here are some things I’ve learned along the way.

Writing is hard, and not in the way I imagined.

Anyone who goes back and looks at some of my first blog posts and then reads some of my last ones will hopefully see what I mean by this. It is not that writing is hard as in sitting down and spilling words onto a page – although that’s not easy, either – it is that writing authentically is hard, sometimes so hard that I find I can’t do it. It is obviously not like this for everyone, but my need to show a vulnerable and introspective side of myself takes courage that I have to muster every time I sit down to write something I’m going to share, and courage again to share it. Writing is hard because, while the words come to me anyway, sharing them is a vulnerable act, and unlike what I always thought, being vulnerable is something I have to choose over and over again. I can’t just decide once that I’m going to do it and voila!, it’s done and easy forever.

Writing takes time.

I mean this in two ways. One, the actual act of writing out what is in one’s head takes time. This may sounds like a “well, duh” statement, but I have found that every time I put an end date or a deadline on my writing, I was killing the project before it started, because I could claim myself a failure for not finishing on time, even as I was trying to gather courage to keep going. The less reasons I have to berate myself the better; realizing that writing takes time is one of them.

The second part of that is realizing that there are many things that can only be learned through experience. When I say that writing takes time in that sense, I mean that I am a better writer today than I was a year ago; if I keep writing, I will be a better writer a year from now than I am today. I cannot rush or hurry this process; I can write every day, but it is the actual passage of time that lends itself to my improvement; time is not slipping away if I am writing, it is adding experience, emotion and credibility to what I have to say.

Not all writing is writing

I think a lot. Maybe more than most. I think a lot about writing. I think a lot about how I would write what I’m thinking or experiencing. And sometimes, I just can’t write or think anymore.

I’ve been stuck on my book, because I’ve been trying to gather courage. I’ve been stuck, and yet I think that it’s important to allow myself the rest before moving ahead. There is nothing more torturous to me than trying to force a solution that is not coming easily, and with artistic expression, forcing something like creativity can turn it into a ugly beast that looks nothing like it’s supposed to. I cannot write what I write with the idea that I must have it out in a certain amount of time; I cannot write with the idea that my life depends on my finishing it within a certain time period. Instead, I have to write remembering that it is being in the present moment with my words that means the most to me; that writing for a future outcome means nothing if all I’m ever focused on is the future.

Sometimes, silence is golden.

Sometimes, invisible audience, I’m really glad that you’re invisible. I have the ability to see the countries where my readers live; I know some of you who read my blog because you’ve told me, but there are others whom I have never heard from that keep the silence, and yet show up every week to see what else I have to say. While some part of me wonders at the lack of feedback, another part of me is glad, because it’s not always easy for me to write what I write here, and knowing that someone is listening and yet not trying to tell me how to change is a balm on a sometimes raw wound that I open to the air here, in the hopes of letting it heal.

Sometimes, feedback is wonderful.

On the other side of that coin, it helps me a lot to know that I’m not alone, and especially to know that I may say something that resonates with someone else. It helps me to know that I am not alone, and that perhaps what I have said has caused someone else to realize that they aren’t alone, either.

The answers are in the minute details.

If there is any single, large and overarching theme that I have learned from writing, it is that the answers come in the small moments. You cannot write a book in a night; you cannot become a best selling author if you lack the courage not just to publish something, but to sit down, day after day, and write like it doesn’t matter what happens to your book. Fighting the fear and the demons is not about one long, drawn out battle with your unconscious fears. It is about getting up every day and taking the smallest steps to combat them: giving yourself 15 minutes to write; giving yourself an hour to run; feeding yourself well and surrounding yourself with people who will cheer you on, not because they are excited about the end product, but because they recognize the beauty, the depth and the relief in the process. It is turning off the idea that writing is a machine that must be fed words daily, and realizing that even if words spill onto the page at the same time every day, the real depth is in the joy felt in holding the pen; in looking up at life from behind the keyboard and knowing, beyond a doubt, that the ability to paint a picture of that world with even a few words is a gift all in itself.

It is knowing that Rome was not built in a day, and that a mountain of sand can be constructed one grain at a time. For me, building that mountain seems to have become the important part, not necessarily what I will see at the top.

Love and learning-along-the-way kisses,

Morgan

Writer’s Tourette’s, Also Known as Word Vomit

“You write like I talk,” he said.

He is a now long-gone ex-boyfriend, who had to get used to getting emails from me instead of having face-to-face conversations about whatever was bothering me about our relationship, or important things that I needed to tell him in general. The subject of each of those emails to him was “Verbal Diarrhea Part [X.]”

The last email I wrote to him – that I wrote but did not send – was called “Last of Verbal Diarrhea,” and never made it farther than my writing folder.

When he said that I wrote like he talked, he meant that I could say things in writing that I could not say out loud – and that many times, there were things written there that I wish I could take back, but some part of me refused to edit and rewrite, because writing that email was the most authentic thing I could do. If he couldn’t take back hurtful things he said to me in the heat of the moment, I sure as hell wasn’t going to censor myself in my emails to him…even if I often went back and corrected the grammar.

I am a writer. I write every day, for my own good, for my own sanity, and my own peace of mind, but even if I didn’t, I would still be a writer, because regardless of what is happening to me I find myself trying to find the words for it in my head; to best describe it; to best apply prose to my feelings, thoughts, emotions and adventures.

This sometimes gets me in trouble. Aside from my need to write, I have a need to write OUT LOUD: to an audience, so someone can hear me, read me, know that there is a part of me that fits best into the words that I have just strung together in a sentence, that may be prosaic and painful, but goddamit, so is the feeling I just had.

It has to come out or it rots. Yes, there is some part of me that wants to share my story so that it can possibly help others to know that they are not alone, but that part seems to be shrinking by the day, leading me to become more and more hesitant about wanting to publish the book I came to Panama to write. It is so personal, so vulnerable, and cuts so deeply through the muscle, the bones, the very marrow of who I am, that I am afraid to show it. I am afraid that people will think that I have not only lost my mind, but that I will never get it back – that if I have felt as low, stuck and depressed as I was during the time I was writing about, it means I will always feel that way. The first writing that lasted in society was written in stone, and it seems that that is the impression: that I took a feeling, painted it with words and stuck it up on the wall, and the people who came to look are looking at a single, raw moment in time, and mistaking it for a long term state of being.

I write because it is the easiest way to clear an emotion. If I am angry and I write about it as if I were tearing the flesh off of someone, the act of creating those flesh-tearing sentences eases my anger. If I feel alone and adrift in a sea of nothing and I can describe that in terms of an ocean of tears below me, I suddenly find that there’s a life raft; that I am no longer drowning but buoyed. If I write about my happiness in terms of the sparkling starlight and standing naked in the full moon, I may or may not have actually been naked, but I was happy nonetheless.

It is not transient, this writing. Even as my emotions flee in front of me as my pen meets paper or my fingers clatter over the keyboard, the words stay, and they are bigger there; they do not dissipate into thin air like my ex-boyfriend’s sometimes hurtful speech, with only the ability to paraphrase later, depending on what I did or didn't want to hear and what he did or didn't want to say.

Do I feel more deeply because I’m a writer, or do I write because I feel deeply? I don’t know. All I know is that the best way for me to let go is to hold on: to grip the pen, put it to the page, and let the ink tell my story. Once it’s out, I have to push send. Not because I am seeking redemption, approval, or even to help someone. It’s because – much like an artist friend says about her work – my writing just happened. It often doesn’t feel like something I could have consciously produced, more like something I stood aside to let my unconscious unleash. When that’s the case, I don’t really feel like I own it anymore: the writings are not mine, and neither are the feelings that sparked them. If it’s not mine, I don’t own it, and I have to let it go. Like a songwriter, a painter, a sculptor or a child throwing a tantrum, sometimes the best, most healing, cathartic and authentic thing you can do is share what it is, because even if it started out as yours, the only way to prevent the rot is to let it out into the light, wishing it well as it floats away.

Love and writer-freed emotions,
Morgan

Choosing to be Authentically Me

“I read your blog. I loved it. It felt so real; so authentic. You talk about the things that all of us experience and yet no one really says out loud. It’s wonderful.”

My new friend Jemma and I were sitting at a restaurant on Boca Brava Island, on Panama’s Pacific coast. We were eating yucca fries and drinking fresh tropical juices. As it always does, it made me incredibly happy to hear that someone had read my blog and enjoyed it; even more so that it sounded authentic, because that has recently been an important part of what I write here: that it presents me: the truly, deeply, unequivocally human Morgan.

I thanked her, and I told her something that I have felt hesitant to share, and yet have been telling people anyway, as if my mouth has attached itself to my heart instead of my head.

“I’ve been writing my book as fiction, but the truth is it’s going to be based on my life, whether I present it as fiction or not. It’s starting to feel important to me that I write and present it exactly as it is: my life and experiences, as I have understood them.”

Of course, she said. Not as simply as that, but that is what I heard, and what surfaced in my mind as I explained to her. Of course it has to be a memoir. Of course the only way I can even pretend to live authentically is to present my story authentically. Of course.

As I step further onto the path I have sought for myself, the easier it seems to be to consider this possibility. The more space and time I have to think about what I want and need, the more it becomes clear that my need is to tell my story: all parts of it, the joys and sorrows; the large and small everyday miracles; the pain, anger and betrayal; the realizations that came along with each of these emotions, and the eventual ability to let them go.

This realization could not have come without my final decision to stop worrying about what people think, because that is the only thing that has stopped me from writing this book already: how others will react to what I have to say, about myself, and about them as part of my story.

I am less worried about what others would say about me, because it is my story. I can take responsibility and appreciate that not everyone is going to agree with what I say; what I have learned; what I need for myself to feel fulfilled and joyous in my existence. I have learned that the hard way, and I am not letting go of the lesson.

What worries me more is something I have only imagined I have any control over: how others will interpret what I have to say about them as part of my story.

I have often wondered at the courage that Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) and now Cheryl Strayed (Wild) exhibited by writing such raw accounts of their lives in their books. To me, it seems that they were able to discuss their relationships and interactions in a way that made it clear that they valued and honored the people in their lives, even when the lessons they learned from them were hard ones; even when heartbreak was the result. I’m not sure how those actual people feel about what was written about them, and yet I find myself compelled to try for the same idea: to present the things I have learned from people without laying blame at their feet.

This is important for two reasons. One – and most important – because I don’t blame anyone for what has happened to me anymore. That would make me a victim, and I am tired of giving away my happiness and power to others by making them the reason for my actions. Two, I have realized that every single person in my life has been put there to teach me something. Often it was not the lesson I wanted to learn, and rarely was it the way I wanted to learn it, but all in all I have come to the point where I realize that I can take what I have given and use it to make my life what I want it to be, or I can hold the pieces up as excuses for why I’m not somewhere else. I feel more empowered by the first option: it allows me to take responsibility for myself and own who and where I am today.

I have to let go, invisible audience. I could write the most loving, amazing account of someone and they could be insulted; I could rip the same person apart and find that they thrive on the attention. I can’t control that. All I can really control is myself. I can only hope that my humanness will come across in my writing in a way that will show I am not out to hurt anyone; that being included in my story at all means that you have made a deep and lasting impact on me that I found worthy of sharing. I have to remember that it is my story, after all, and I have a right to tell it.

I have decided to write authentically, in first person, telling my life as my own, and I have to trust that if I do it from the heart, from a place of love instead of a place of revenge or victimization, the people that it is supposed to touch will be touched. As much as I wish I could keep anyone else from reading it, anyone who would not understand, there is only one way to do so: to not write it at all.

In my search for authenticity, there is no room for that kind of silence.

Love and authentic kisses

Morgan