Why I keep writing
It gives purpose.
It builds a home.
It joins lives.
It allows for calm, peace.
It fills a void.
It answers a call.
It sparks life.
It sedates anger, fear.
It adds to the light.
It takes from the dark.
It mediates experiences.
It awakens love, hope.
It is medicine.
It comforts the breaking.
It builds the broken.
It breaths help, justice.
It takes time.
It ages and dies.
It is born again and again.
It thinks on life, death.
What I really wanted to ask was,
Do you believe in me?
I know I’ve asked before,
But I feel so empty.
I want this dream so badly.
It stands so far away.
You tell me to keep fighting,
But I only seem to stray.
If I don’t push forward,
There’s only possibilities.
Yet this hole grows more and more,
Fraught with anxieties.
A new excuse, another tale,
To pause my future demise.
I don’t see anything else,
Yet I know I’m telling lies.
So what I really wanted to ask was,
Do you think I will succeed?
Is my dream worth fighting for?
Will you help me, please?
For the past few days, I have been obsessed with drawing a pair of interesting eyes, and the other day I toyed around a bit. I love my eye (minus the eyelashes), and I gave it a home on a female face. Lips, nose, hair, the lot.
Now it isn’t finished. I am probably going to keep playing around with it, maybe add colour. Ultimately I don’t know exactly what its final form will be, but I know I will enjoy getting it there.
I am sure my proportions are off, but I’m trying. That’s gotta count for something, right?
Along side this, I am trying to figure out a logo for my blog, which I am thinking will include water colours.
Still writing though I need to grow in that arena, somehow. Take a step back from poems, and try a short story? Or something. We’ll see where my mind takes me.
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default. ~ J. K. Rowling
P.S. While I am still reading A Game of Thrones, I have picked up a self-help book (yeah, I know) called The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. Andrew said I needed it, and I guess we’ll see if he’s right.
I’m wondering
If you can save me from myself
Because I’m drowning
And the dark Abyss looks so
Tempting.
Will I see in this black pit of despair?
The night time air calms me
Lulls me into a state of
Security.
And then I see you
In my mind’s eye.
A Rock
A Safe Place.
I fight against the waters
Thick like Spider’s webbing
Around my limbs.
It pulls me down
Heavy, a weight unlike any other.
But you’re here, reaching out.
Your hands grip mine
And the water falls away
Safe and playful again.
You whisper in my ear
Quiet, and oh so loud
Reminding me of Promises
I made to myself.
Without you,
I’d be the wind’s toy,
Tossed amongst the trees
Only to be
Lost.
It’s time to find my own feet
And stand firm.
I know you are there for me
As I try to be for you.
We’ll catch each other
If we Fall
But for now
We stand in day’s light
Far from our Shadows.
I haven’t drawn in years, if I am honest. I used to love drawing, painting, molding clay. It was an amazing thing to create something from the mind, or mimic an existing object/person. Flaws added depth to it though I struggled with that fact.
Being a perfectionist is not great when you want to be creative, and thus I have been hesitant to do anything artistic for a long time (unless it was instructional). Today I decided to pull out a sketch book and pencils, and make something, anything.
It’s simple, but I drew this evergreen tree. It probably sucks, but I am proud of it, because at least it looks how I wanted it to (sort of).
Art in all its forms bring a beauty to the world that I enjoy soul deep. It is necessary for any creative soul to find their medium or niche in the world to share their imagination, but it doesn’t hurt to dapple in others at the same time.
I have posted a lot of poems, and will continue to do so, but I am also going to be playing with my drawing pencils. Hopefully I will get some paint and canvas soon to fiddle around there, too.
Sorry for the quality of the picture. Cellphones don’t take the greatest photos so I am hoping I can get my digital camera working. Well, it works, but I don’t have the cable required to transfer photos to the computer just yet. Plus I need an SD card to be able to take more than just a couple photos.
Painted this last December with my mom, aunt, and one of my cousins at a Paint Nite. It was quite fun aside from a work group next to us looking for perfection in something meant to be pure fun.
Anyways, hope you like it!
I have officially started reading A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. I am only two chapters in, but I am enjoying the writing style for sure. I expected it to be similar to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series yet I am appreciating the fact that it is not.
When a book hooks me, I tend to finish it pretty quick, unable to stop reading it. However with books like Lord of the Rings or The Prince of Nothing series, it took months to read. I did enjoy them the whole way through, but they were painstakingly dull at times.
I can’t explain why I felt A Game of Thrones would be similar to Lord of the Rings in terms of writing. Maybe the hype? Its genre? Anyway, while I find it more modern, or easier to read, it does have a formal tone in its language that I envy. I believe it makes it sophisticated, and somehow makes a book more attractive to readers.
Readers may like easy reads, but many enjoy a more complex story, settings, character development. I want to build worlds like a great many authors do outside the confines of our world, or even revealing fantastical layers of it. I guess that is why I am trying to read the books I am, to figure it out.
A Game of Thrones has inspiring phrases, or fragments of sentences that I might just use for some more poems, or maybe an attempt at a short story. After all I do believe all writer’s go through a period of trying to find their own voice, and mimicking their favourite authors on the way. It is educational, I think, and might do me some good in the end.
Today has been one of those days. Low energy, but restless.I decided to help my husband, Andrew, look for his old phone while he’s at work, and it has been a roller coaster ride for my emotions.
Our house is a bit of a storage zone. Every room has nooks and crannies that I have managed to make useful, but it’s becoming less and less effective. While we have done a huge purge of stuff, we still have a ton of ‘crap’ one of us or both of us refuse to part with.We collect Lego (Star Wars, Marvel Superheroes, Batman, etc), Star Wars items, and movies/TV shows. We are also huge fans of fireworks, and they take up a decent chunk of the garage. As individuals, he collects pig related stuff, and I have my Cherished Teddies collection.
Add in necessities, and you can imagine the warzone our house is when we need to find something.
Andrew has gone through the workshop, the garage, the small animal room, the office, our bedroom, front hall closet, kitchen, and laundry room to find his old phone. He has done this multiple times. I tinker here and there trying to help, but he gets so obsessively frantic, it puts me on edge. I can NEVER find something when I am on edge, so today, I decided to do it while he is out of the house.
I started with the workshop where I found two of his old, old phones, but not the most recently old phone (if that makes sense). I dug through some of the boxes in the office, and ripped through my trunks in our bedroom’s closet and some of his drawers. No luck.
Well, this is where the roller coaster starts for me.
After failing to find it, I decided to go through our many totes of Lego kits, Christmas village stuff, wedding stuff, and my Hallowe’en town stuff. (Side note: Hallowe’en is my FAVOURITE holiday, and the biggest reason I want to learn how to sew). Anyways, as I am rifling through these totes, I find wedding stuff.
To note in the wedding stuff I found
-the reading “These Hands” from our ceremony
-my maid of honour’s speech
-a motivational, loving book from my mom
Dumb ass that I am, I read “These Hands”, and it resonated with the life I wished for more than anything. Hands that loved and cared for me. Hands to hold me in the dark times. Hands that would hold our children. Hands that would help mine in keeping our family one.
I want children more than anything, a family with Andrew, but we just aren’t there in our lives. It sucks, because he will be 33 years old towards the end of this year, and I am going to be 27 in twelve days. It feels so old, and yet I know it isn’t. I know I have more time than not, but it feels like it is slipping away faster than I could have imagined. I know it will happen when it is meant to, but damned if I wish it would happen now.
Reading that bit of our vows though made me realize that a marriage, a life together, is very much like art. You have to work for it. Sometimes, there are mistakes that you can correct, and other times, you just push past it. Sometimes, what you think you are making is nothing like it, and you go with it to find something amazing, or you correct your path. I am very lucky to have Andrew in my life, willing to fight for our marriage, and help me make it all it can be. I wish I had of stopped reading the stuff I found after this, but I didn’t.
Dumb ass that I am, I read the speech, and it is beautiful. But it is over two years old, and it made me realize how much has changed between my maid of honour (my future sister-in-law now) and myself. She said we had become closer, had become friends in the speech, but that isn’t the truth anymore. I can’t tell you when it happened, but it happened.
One thing you need to know about me… I don’t really have friends. I have my parents, and I have my husband, and that is it. I don’t let people in as easily as I once did, because of the many betrayals I faced at the hands of so called friends. It killed me inside to read this beautiful speech, and realize the lie it had seemingly become. I don’t know how to change things with her, and I would if I did. I would love to have friends to do things with, but I have been shattered by past experiences, and am hesitant to let it happen again.
Thus, I bawled my eyes out in big, wailing cries. Once it was a small enough feeling to be bottled, I did, and continued on with the task at hand. That’s when I came across the book from my mom.
Dumb ass that I am, I read the book since it wasn’t long, and it was amazing. It is exactly what I needed to hear, and yet… it devastated me. It was about showing your true self to the world, how you’re beautiful no matter what, and amazing regardless of nay sayers. It is how I wish things were, for sure, but the constant feedback I have been given through life is that I am ‘too much’ of everything. I need to tone myself down, swear less, lose weight, lie…. All to have friends, and be liked. That never made sense to me. Shouldn’t people like you as you are?
Anyway, I took those notes and applied them to myself. I struggle with some, (like my volume and weight), but overall, when around my siblings or my in-laws or in public, I try to be that likable person who people want in their life. I don’t know if it is remotely working, (I do have two nephews who adore Andrew and me), but I don’t have friends asking me to hang out. I don’t have family, (outside of my mom and two nephews), asking to spend time with me.
I know that part of it is on me. I need to put myself out there, conquer my insecurities, and find people who like me for me. Join a sport, or club, or something. But it is amazingly, soul cripplingly tough for me. I see someone ugly in every way in the mirror. I dissect every interaction I have with other humans, and find myself lacking. I had a New Year’s resolution to change that, but I am going to be honest, I have no idea where to start.
Sorry to ramble, but I felt the need to put it down on ‘paper’, to better reflect on it all. Maybe it is a sign that I don’t need to change, just push for my dreams, and fight for the things I want from life. Maybe it is a sign I desperately do need to change in some ways, to feel better and live better. Maybe it is a bit of both. Hopefully I figure it out sometime in the very near future.
In the meantime, any tips or tricks to help me out, or tales to relate to, would be amazing.
Thanks for reading this randomness!
Oh dearest friend of mine,
Use this stick and draw line,
Stand there til the dawn of time.
And when bright light shows its face,
You may then leave this place,
Yet find that all has been erased.
I charge you now, to start again,
To write the stars that now defend,
What broken will be made to mend.
When the end returns once more,
And destroys the earth back to the core,
We’ll heal what is now left sore.
I am tired.
Tired of carrying the house’s chores.
My husband’s constant need for backrubs.
I am tired .
Tired of figuring out dinner night after night.
My dogs’ inane need to whine every morning.
I am tired.
Tired of feeling worthless, hung out to dry.
My siblings’ hateful gaze when I speak.
I am tired.
Tired of feeling alone, pulling myself up.
My inner mind’s dark, dark voice.
I am tired.
Tired of sleeping in, depressed.
My dream’s constant hold on me.
I am tired.
Tired of carrying everyone’s problems alongside my own.
My need to please all those around me.
I am tired.
Tired of throwing myself to the side.
My desire to put everyone else before me.
I am tired.
Why doesn’t anyone see that?
Why doesn’t anyone help?
Why doesn’t anyone lend a kind word?
Kember's Journey 