When you ask me to write from the heart

You ask me to write from the heart.

Yet, dipping my pen into the ink of my heart to make it speak evokes fear in me. I know it’s resistance. I have no doubt, in fact.

I’ll let it out right now: it’s the resistance to truth. My own truth. The vulnerability of life.

When you ask me to write from the heart, you are asking me to get underneath my own protective skin, the one that I have made myself believe keeps me safe from  my own sensitivity. You are asking me to give up my shield without knowing what will crawl out of the opening I make.

You are asking me to be brave in the midst of immense fear and to grow balls of self-compassion when faced with a demon that has plagued me for lifetimes. You see, if I start writing it all down, it will make it all real. The words will bring up feelings, and then memories. Even ones that I had sworn I would never acknowledge again. Maybe true writers are shamans who can walk on fire. They alchemize the pain of humanity through the pain on their soles (souls) and are able to transcend it. Maybe that’s what writers do: walk on lava-hot emotional coals.

Falling prey to my resistance, I want to say that you are asking for too much. I want to deny all I know about healing and how the heart has to open to heal. This is no different than having to open my mouth to eat food. I don’t resist opening my mouth.

The truth is: I can’t heal without opening my heart. But I resist that. In order to write from the heart, we must be unafraid to know ourselves. We must know that we have the compassion to witness our story, to feel our way in and accept what was. We must see our humanity, vulnerability, demons and our clumsy decisions through the eyes of compassion.

When we write from the heart, we take the risk of finally seeing a part of us with a naked eye. We must be ready to embrace it. Otherwise, we don’t need to write at all. If we aren’t willing to love what is revealed, we won’t want to write.

That’s the cost of writing. And not writing. That’s the fear.

When you ask me to write from the heart, you’re asking, “Are you going to love what you find or not?” I can delay answering that till I’m 80, just as much as I can delay writing my story. That’s option #1. I think I can safely assume that I would die slowly, in excruciating increments, in the next 40 years. That will be the longest cold Ber months there ever was.

The second option still involves death as well as all the seasons: I write, I die fast, I lay there for a while and I become reborn from the ashes. I drop all preconceived ideas of who I should be, and surrender to that rebirth.

That’s the gift of writing. That’s also terrifying…