I’m terrified. Honestly scared. I am frightened that I won’t be any good at this “writing” thing. It’s been over a year since I’ve written anything of note. Sure, I’ve penned a few poems in recent months, but the last time I wrote something longer form was just after The Force Awakens was released in theaters in 2015.
I have an image in my mind’s eye. I stand upon a precipice, about to fall over. One wrong step, and I plummet to my death. I should be staring at the setting sun, watching the moon rise and the stars appear, but instead my gaze is locked on the long dark below me. Inside my shoes, my toes are desperately curling, trying in vain to clamp on to the narrow ledge in front.
This image represents my fear of failure. It has been so strong it has kept me from writing for over a year. I don’t know where exactly it came from, what manifested it inside my brain, but it has been there: lurking.
I have many things I want to write about: Rogue One, Passengers, the untimely death of a princess turned general, my not-7th wedding anniversary, the passing of the most logical being in the galaxy, a few new year’s resolutions, all the death and gloom that was twenty16, and the list continues. But I have been afraid. Afraid that my opinion is not valid, afraid that I won’t have the words, afraid of what she will think, afraid to memorialize too late, afraid to say the wrong thing…afraid.
The abyss rises to grab me.
I had an interesting experience this evening. I am still not sure what it was I saw, but as I was locking my door, on my way out to pick up dinner, I saw something out of the corner of my eye, something dark and shadowy that disappeared behind the corner of the house as soon as I focused on it. I don’t put faith in ghosts or apparitions, though because of medication that I take I have been known to hallucinate from time to time, except only when I don’t take it. I thought about what I saw all during the drive out and back. Initially, I was spooked. I had no idea what I had I seen, if I had in fact seen anything, and that unknowning, that uncertainty scared me a little. I’m a grown man, almost 30, in fact, and I am not given to remaining afraid. Except…
Except I haven’t written in over a year out of sheer bloody panic.
In the end I decided, on my way home, that what I had seen was the coattail of my future time traveling self ducking out of the way so that I wouldn’t see myself and thereby destroy the space time continuum. (Or pass out from shock.) Instantly, I was unafraid.
And here I am writing. It still took me a few more hours of mindless mobile Scrabble and Ticket to Ride before I pulled myself off my bed and settled down in front of my laptop to actually put one word after another. And somewhere, in my head, in my heart, deep in the outer rim of my soul, I am still afraid. But I cannot let that fear stop me from doing what I love and that is to write. So I will write. I will write about Carrie Fisher, Leonard Nimoy, my ex-wife, movies that I have fallen in love with, what I have resolved this new year, the late twenty-teens and so on.
I am stronger than my fear. I back from the ledge to catch the last few rays of sunlight fading into twilight blue. I write.
a simple man 