I was standing at the kitchen bench, knife in hand and a slab of ham in front of me.
‘This is what you do,’ I thought to myself. Maybe it was the coffee, maybe it was the Mimosa. It seemed like a thought that came from nowhere, yet was profound in the moment it appeared to me.
It was a thought as visual as it was constructed of nouns and verbs.
‘You slice away at the meat of life until you hit the bone.’
Sometimes holding a pen, metaphorical or otherwise) feels like holding a knife at the throat of someone you love.
Perhaps that’s why writers drink: we need the courage that comes with loosening the inhibitions, the fear, the risk.
The virtues of public and private decency compete like never before in this digital age. When anyone can publish, there is no subtle observational art in how writers write. We can publish at a moment’s notice and therefore it is as easy to assume that all observations are those of our closest acquaintance. And often it is.
There’s the truth of it – sometimes I do not write about you, but sometimes I do. Sometimes I cut away at the flesh of our very real, everyday lives until I hit the bone. Then, even then, sometimes I am tempted not to stop but to continue carving until I hit the marrow.
Then , once I have hit the bone and passed through to the marrow – I hope that I have struck the core of it.
I want my words to cut to the core of who we are, to the very deepest and sacred parts of us. I want us to be challenged. I am challenged when I think it and even more so to write these thoughts in ways sharp enough to penetrate but thoughtful enough that my good intentions are clear.
Sometimes when I feel my words are like the knife at your throat, I think about stopping, holding back. But these words ring in my ear ..
“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” – Anaïs Nin
I do not write to hurt you, rather to peel you back. To give you permission to live more exposed, more real, more true. To accept you as you are and as I am, all flaws exposed and not hidden. I write to carve you out, to tease you out until you have no choice but to show yourself unbound to the world.
Whatever those ideas of identity, belief, value, truth, sex, sensuality, spirituality and ambition are – I hope to use my words to bring them to life in you, willing you to come into the light. I want to know you. I want to experience you in the same fullness I offer myself to you.
As much as I am trying to carve you out, to really see you – I am exposing my own marrow and hoping you see me.