Dear Diary,
If I quit beating around my feelings in metaphorical bullshit, would it count as creative non-fiction? If I lay bare my thoughts and feelings and just talk like a 40-year-old woman done with life, complaining over mimosa to no one in particular, bitching with satire about how her father screwed her up emotionally? I am not forty but I am old enough to understand patterns and give myself a thorough psychoanalysis of how my home has affected my emotional growth, now that I wonder why I come off as emotionally constipated.
And when I do open up, I can’t stop myself from going into a nervous breakdown torn between wanting to protect my heart and the voice in my head that goes, “how will they know if you don’t tell them?” Whatever this in between is, I am clearly not having the time of my life here. I am twenty-something with a whole portfolio of emotional issues and trying to figure out if this is generationally fucked up or is it just my self-image, a perception of others that I made my own?
I was told that I have been the quiet girl, the one who never asks for anything more, the kind to not take up space. But what if I want to take up space? What if I don’t want to be the quiet one? What if I want to be someone who appeases me rather than conforming to the perception of who I am? I want to flip the script on myself and rewrite whatever personality failure this is. Let me rephrase that. It is not personality failure, it is conforming to the beliefs of who I am based on what I was told, the words that I considered to be praise. Sure, they might be, but I definitely don’t itch to be the girl who doesn’t take up space. I want to be obnoxiously loud for all I care.
Love unapologetically, and love enough that I don’t need anyone to make me feel complete or whatever that nonsense is. I think we can all collectively agree we as a generation are way beyond that. Forgive me if I have over-generalised. I feel like I can love myself to an extent that I’d be happy by myself. Even though it all oscillates in my heart, I have it in me that doesn’t crumble because all I got was half-assed care when I gave my heart and soul to someone I actually give a damn about.
If I take this chaotic diary entry to the internet and attach it on the Substack email…I wonder what this rawness can do to the world. But something about this feels liberating. I have got enough plot lines to make myself a deeply emotionally layered character. Like so rich and now stupidly self-aware that it kinda sucks sometimes. On most days, I just want to rant. I just want to say how fucked up everything is for me right now. How I feel like my life is nothing short of uneventful and then I see the world move on anyway, I feel like a clock that’s frozen in time because the batteries are dead. Those batteries are my soul (consider it for dramatic effect).
I am only a human. What a terrible thing to say. And then on a random Tuesday I decide that I have the creative freedom, that I can vent for all I care, feel that tiny spark of validation for this mess in my heart and chaos in my head. Whatever helps me sleep at night. It is not just another journal entry, it is attempts at… I don’t know what.
See this is what I mean. When I stop turning my pain into art what does it become? When I stop decorating it in metaphors and personification and trying to describe melancholy on paper like Shakespeare did, what is left of me? When I stop framing it as a piece of art and I simply sit down on the fucking floor and say, listen, or don’t, this is how I feel… I can only wonder how that would be received. I can’t fathom it even in the depths of my imagination because the idea of expression itself is so absurd that it’s not normal for a creature like me to talk about feelings without making it seem like it was written with calloused fingers, a bleeding heart and a scarred soul.
Now I find this amusing. I imagine the retrospective bias of the reader who will read this. The people who know me or know of me. I wonder if they will try to find hidden meaning between the pauses, the gaps in the lines and the paragraph indentations. I will keep it open to interpretation just for the fun of it. Life is chaos and so am I currently.
Embrace the mess, they said. And I damn right did.