I search for my muse in coffee shops, on iPods, in friend’s faces. I sit and think, “maybe today, I will write like I mean to, like I want to, like I’m meant to.” But words get lost in Twitter streams, in frantic readying for this or that, in bottomless glasses. My ability to string beautiful words together suffers for all this ADD living I’m doing, but then maybe I’m not supposed to write beautiful words, just words, and that needs to be enough.
Here’s something though: I can’t live with how I write now. There’s got to be something more. Something better. More metaphors perhaps, longer sentences, more meaning.
The other side of my brain wants today’s words to be enough.
They never are, they never are.
It’s a bomb in my head.
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I have a friend who tells me that my greatest challenge is to be OK with who I am and to feel enough; not less than. Daily I am confronted with this potential lesson, a flower unbloomed, and each day the bud shrivels and falls to the ground as I grind it underfoot. Not meaning to. But still.
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Someone’s recognized something good in me, an as-yet, a potential-bloom, and I can’t believe her. I lament to my husband, “When will she discover I’m not up to it? I can’t do this thing? My words lack. I’m not the person she thinks?”
And he says, “But you are.”
“That is that.”
My sighs are heavy. My mind is weak. I grasp for the words and hold on. I want “that” to be “that.”
Whyever can’t I believe it for myself?
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I’m jealous of one thing. Not a house, a ring, a man, a body, a life. I am jealous of a person’s ability to not apologize for who she is. To live completely in the knowledge that she is flawed, but good. And fuck you if you don’t like it. I want that fuck you. I want to say it and mean it; not because it’s dirty, not because it’s shocking, but because FUCK YOU.
And by “you,” I mean “me.”
Insecurity is a bitch that lives in my head.
Fuck you.
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I dream of standing before my other self, or having four arms, of hugging the reflection and giving the “A-OK!” sign with the hands that are free. Of looking meaningfully at the other self, of telling her, “you are enough. you are enough. you are enough.”
Of having her believe it.
Of having her bloom.
Right in front of my eyes.
My muse.
What do you want to tell your mirror self?