One Paragraph in One Line
A secret code
There’s an inherent fear wrapped inside the pages of my journal. When I flip to the day I ask myself if I’m brave enough to write what actually has me by the grip. Am I capable of telling the truth to myself, ruthlessly? I wonder who will read the entries one day and if that should keep my voice tempered. As I close the pages and leave them publicly on the coffee table, in the middle of the room, for all to sit at the edge of their curiosity to open it, I wonder… have they? Does knowing that anyone could simply open and read my words keep me from fully speaking them?
In When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams writes:
“When I want to see the furthest into my soul, I will write a sentence by hand and then write another sentence over it, followed by another. An entire paragraph will live in one line, and no one else can read it…I call it my confessional.”
A secret code. A voice unhindered. I have things I want to say but don’t want to write. I have things I want to say but don’t want to speak out loud. Maybe I’m not ready yet. Maybe I don’t want to wonder if someone is reading over my shoulder. Maybe it’s something I’m not ready to look at or have looking back at me in black and white. Yet, I want breathing room. Yet, I want to scream this thing out of me.
I’ve adopted her idea of writing in code. Something only myself and the page can know. A secret message between me and my soul. Poetry is like that. Ruthless honesty and wild emotions in their fullest bodies, dancing to sirens and symbolism. Fires can be going off in my head and poetry knows how to catch the embers. But there are things that need even more privacy than poetry.
Do not be afraid of your interior life. Embrace all that goes on within you so it’s not churning deep down in the depths of you.
“If we adopt a personalized script, even a secret one, we are released from the need to perfect content. We are freed from our public morality. We can set an honest path of inquiry with our pen.”
Writing in this way, with one line atop another, atop another, has set many of my caged birds free. I am no longer holding on to words left unsaid. Instead, I am creating waves across the page. Letters crashing in layers over one another, with a few “y’s” and “g’s” and “l’s” untucked. I cannot see what I am writing but it is being written. A private act between hand and heaven. I write and it looks like I’m scribbling, or creating, or destroying and I do so until the path is cleared. Until I am free. Until I am floating on a wave on the page instead of drowning inside one in my head.
This is a practice of honesty and truth.
Write your secrets, your confessional, your shouts, your prayers, your deepest thoughts, in one line. Word on top of word, sentence on top of sentence.
much love,
n