Writing makes things right again, pure and simple.

Writing makes things tangible again, brings us back to real time rather than yesterday or tomorrow. Writing allows us to sort the facts from the fantasy, both idealized and frightening. Writing makes things right again, every time we allow ourselves the space to let our thoughts flow freely – you know what I’m talking about, I am sure of it.

Not laborious, face of the red-pen bearing grim reaper of words third grade teacher you would rather forget but words, flowing freely like the cursive e’s I didn’t even know were “e’s” scrawled along blue lined paper.

When I close my eyes and allow my memory to drift, I can still feel that paper across my lap, against the skin on my little four-year-old-thighs. “I’m writing,” I would say, I’m sure earnestly. “I’m writing” and I knew it felt good and I knew writing could make anything better.

It isn’t the actual mechanics though it is.

It isn’t the finding perfection, it is allowing the perfection and the imperfect imperfection to crowl quietly down your forearm and dive off the tip of your pencil or pen. “Julie, do you remember? Julie, do you hear what I’m saying? Julie… darling one…. Hi.”

I remember the first time I was in a psychiatrist’s office and my head was bent and eyes, downcast in a stew of numb disbelief, unnamed fear and the silent, unwhispered help I sometimes see in the faces of homeless people who have given up begging because it stopped working.

That dear psychiatrist but his face in a place where my eyes would see him.

That’s what words do, too.

Sometimes I don’t recognize it until the first re-read and I say, some level of surprise greeting my face, “I wrote that? That came from me?”

YES! The you buried underneath all the stuff people say you should be, the tasks others say “you should do that” all the beliefs that created this brick wall of unworthy which we want to deconstruct and make into a meandering path to what is actually true for you.

I found in my Brain Dump the other day “righting” for writing – and that’s how my words reminding me, “Writing makes things right, every time.”