I never thought it would be me. Trying to feel.

I have spent my life feeling everything so deeply that even when I felt nothing, I felt that completely too. My emotions fueled my life in a way I wasn’t aware of until they were finally whipped into submission.

I discovered this when I sat down to write after taking a year off. I still have words. I still have emotions, I just don’t have the ability to stay in the emotion long enough to get the thoughts to flow through my fingers and come out as something more than just half empty sentences.

The more I consider this, I realize how dependent on emotion my writing was. After finishing my third book many people asked for more. They wanted to know what happened to Jules. I wanted to tell them. To show them. I got started on the next part of her story, then it became too much.

When I write, or used to, I transport myself back to an experience or memory of a feeling and live in it. I use that feeling to fuel what comes next. Be it a fictional story or true essay on my thoughts. Telling Jules’ story was emotionally heavy. Telling the rest of her story was going to be like trying to hold the stone still as Sisyphus tried to push it. I wasn’t ready. Every time I tried I would decide I wasn’t ready. I knew where telling the rest of her story would need to take me and I couldn’t agree to go there. Not yet. Not again.

Enter medication.

When you feel things deeply I think it goes without saying that includes emotions on all sides of the emotional spectrum. While writing I would purposely take myself places in order to tell a story or convey an idea, in my every day life I didn’t get to be so intentional. Let me say that a different way. When I wasn’t purposefully accessing emotions, I didn’t get to choose when an emotion would want to be observed or acknowledged. Happy emotions were no problem but the darker ones were heavy and I was tired. Tired of wrangling, tired of watching, waiting, feeling my way through. I took the meds.

A year later, I realize I haven’t written anything worth reading. This may not be worth reading, but I need to say it.

I still have emotions and can feel things, just not as intensely and more importantly not for very long. It was that emotional sticking power that drove my desire to write. It is what made me feel like I had to say something. It was what made me keep going in a story or essay because I could feel the importance.

Today, I am grieving that loss.

The medication has helped in more ways than hurt, I think. No, it has. But I miss that part of myself.

I want to try and access that part again. As I type this now, I feel the soft buzz of emotion wanting to return, it just keeps slipping through my hands. I will practice holding on. I will practice intentional feeling because I have things that need to be said, that need to be heard. I want my words, my life, to have meant something.