So many different factors can make us “at risk” relative to the other professionals in our lives.
Yes, we’ve all fallen in the past year. On wet tile, loose gravel, slick ice, rickety stairs, under the weather, over the moon, off the charts, in full view, in love, out of luck. And we can’t always get up again. Not right away. Sometimes only write-away. Occasionally more of a stuck-in-the-muck-feeling-it situation. With words and images or grumbling and PT.
Have we ever written:
- Through physical pain
- As a solution to existential crisis
- From a hospital bed
- In a notebook weighed against food
- On medication good for pain but not punctuation
- While getting paid to do another, needed job
- In the middle of the night
- With kids splayed out all over you
- With ghosts splayed out all over you
- While incarcerated
- On technology older than yourself
- In secret
- By trying to dictate trapped thoughts to another
- Knowing no one would ever read it
- Under the heft of addiction
- With the fridge and shelves bare
- Weeping
- Trying not to weep
- Hurling language that has been hurled at you
- Without translation or apology
- Openly begging to be heard?
We all have. That’s why we’re here, hear. How do we know we’re not alone? Because just look at everybody out there doing it, pressing through human life to write, illustrate, use their voices. How do they all know they’re not alone? Because here we are, all, doing it, pressing through human life to write, illustrate, use our voices.