Dealing With My "It"

I know some of you might not understand this, and that's okay. But I feel the need to share something that's happened recently.

I've lost my words. They are gone, slipped away like a thief in the night, deviously slinking off under cover of darkness. It's a writer’s worst fear.

Yes, I have no words.

For the last three weeks, the tools of my trade have chosen to remain locked up deep inside my head. This happens occasionally, but their absence frustrates me immensely. I’m angry with them for hiding from me, and I hope that by sharing this, it will help them return. Because no matter how much effort I expend, no matter how desperately I try to liberate them, I cannot convince them it is safe to come out. They choose to remain behind the cold, steel bars of my mind. Even though I have swung the gates to their prison wide open and the padlocks hang limply by their hasps, my frightened words refuse take advantage of their independence.

It makes me angry as hell that my words choose safety and confinement over freedom and adventure. They have been my own personal chain-gang for most of my life, even though I only recently started sharing them openly. But I treated them well. I guarded them lovingly and only used them wisely, like a good steward, even as I gently bound them to the core of my being. If I could just visit them in their jail cells and show them the ugliness of their apathy, I could convince them to break free of their self-imposed confinement. But today, as with yesterday and the day before, I am denied. No visitor's pass for me. They have rejected my presence and retreated to the farthest corners of my mind, burrowing deeper in the chambers of my subconscious.

It’s not the first time my words have hidden from me. I also know it won’t be the last. It’s a difficulty I have had to wrestle with since the day my brain aneurysm exploded. Luckily, this inability to liberate my words is usually short-lived. And it is the only deficit I was left with after the neurosurgeons repaired the raging tornado, a burst blood vessel, in my brain.

Only a few months after repairing the destruction, the surgical team excitedly released me from their care. They rejoiced, declaring me fully recovered and "functionally normal." They instructed me to live my life exactly as I did before, or exactly as I wished. To live as if “it” never happened. But for me and my words, “it” did happen, we have the scars to remind us of it, and we have never been exactly the same. And now, together, my words and I seem to suffer from some type of occasional, imaginary, if not neurological, post-traumatic stress disorder, and we retreat to safety when overwhelmed by the outside world.

When "it" happened, when that hateful aneurysm exploded, I fought hard for control of the epicenter where my words reside, the center of my brain. In the end, I won the battle. But "it" --that vile anarchist -- left behind a few hidden land mines filled with the poison of disorder and disarray. Occasionally I step on one and it causes my thought processes to stumble. Then fall. And that's when my vocabulary and my communication skills get scared and run for cover. I cannot describe how much I HATE that "it" still has negative effects on the clarity of my thinking. And I DESPISE that “it” still has the power to periodically imprison my words and disrupt my ability to fully express myself.

Luckily, each time I have lost my words, I have found my way back to them fairly quickly. As my words begin to peek out from hiding, I soothe them and gently caress their scars. Soon, they begin to recover, just as we did four years ago, bound together in the unimaginable pain. But even though my words will eventually reemerge, they will avoid venturing too far from their safe haven. These days, they clump together near the entrance, timid and awkward, eyeing each other nervously. They desperately yearn to escape and scamper about, joyously and unrestricted, as they did before "it" happened. But they are not quite daring enough. At least, not yet.


Even though the ability to make my words work for me has never been exactly the same, I have found ways to work around "it." I watch closely for the land mines and I force myself to explore the landscape anyway. I forge on, unwavering in the quest to find my words and force them back into the daylight to use them for self-expression. Although it is hard work, I remain determined to find my words each time, and once again bend them to my will.

So for now, I shall keep hunting for my beloved words until I succeed, and coax them outside again.  I know that with a little luck, my words and I will soon be reunited. And together, we will once again thrive. Freely. Joyously. Boldly.

I have vowed to myself, and to my words, that I will not let “it” change or define us. And I will not allow “it” to EVER rule the ability to use my words. I will not let "it" hurt us easily, and I will fight "it" forever. I will NEVER let "it" win.

There is no moral to my story today, no lesson to be learned from my lament. I have nothing to offer you in conclusion, because I have no more words--this essay includes every word I have been able to hijack. All I have to leave you with is this weak and wordy dissertation, the byproduct of my anger and frustration in the absence of my words. I hope it is enough.

As for me, I am going back to work. I have some word-hunting to do. Wish me luck.