Clenching
Unclenching: Epilogue
When I started this substack it hurt, just how taut I was wound in absurdity. Anxious to start writing publicly, therefore of course I avoided it, dwelling instead in anxiety—or I avoided that, too.
For how exactly could I hope to conjure a robust-enough depiction of robustness?
It felt as if, if I did not begin with just the perfect words—and how could I meet them, without a conversation?—I should never earn the license to start speaking. Yet, for so long I had also felt the crushing urge to speak, as if I might suddenly justify why I exist, once and for all. My words would pour and pour, until…
Irony’s a symptom. Trapped, I feared I had no right to speak on being trapped. Once the words were out, my prison would lay plain for you to see. Then you would say, “who are you to lecture on escape?”
I knew your words would burn me in my shame, for I had barred my cell with burning flame.
I denied myself this sacred beauty: I don’t know what you will say. Maybe you’ll judge; maybe you’ll cheer. Maybe you’ll listen, and maybe forget. Will you laugh? (Will I learn?) Maybe I will go unheard.
Still I’m drawn by my desire to speak and to be heard. And still at times I’m overcome by lowness, struck by some perceived inferiority, by memory of all the vaster-minded, more-respected people who’ve inspired the things I’ve shared. In some ways still, my trap remains.
But now I’ve gone outside—and my symptom dissolved on approach, a mirage I had fearfully spied from a window, but never up close.
This post, this right here’s what first I longed to say. It didn’t feel right, starting with it. How would he, the one I was, respect himself if in beginning, he began complaining and appealing? So here I am to make the futile reach to validate myself to you at last.
Well these few paragraphs will be enough to let it go, I think, now I’m not grasping near as hard for painful, pointless things I know will simply vanish when I do not grasp for them.
I’ll keep on writing here, of course.