Dispatches From the Heart of the Heat

On messy middles, and not wanting to share the warmth just yet

Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash

My 41st birthday is next month, and I’ve been doing so much reflection on the last couple of years on my daily morning walks. As my therapist has said to me again and again lately, “It’s a LOT.”

Or as I’ve responded to more than one person who has asked me how life has been lately: “…there’s been a lot of life happening.”

This has been my short and sweet and slightly elusive way of acknowledging that there’s been so many dreams chased and life lost in my life since New Year’s 2023. It’s been my way of not having to go into details that I’m afraid people don’t necessarily want or are able to hear when they ask the seemingly simple question, “What’s new with you?” Sometimes, it’s my way of not completely melting into a tearful mess during particular tender moments that just happen to be open up in the middle of a work day or the produce section of the grocery store or at a family gathering. These soft spots during my days are like crevices in the heart that threaten to swallow me whole.

I’ve been trying to follow the lead of the quote I shared with you in my last newsletter, Follow the Heat:

“Write where it’s warm. Follow the heat.”

While I seek out the heat in my own private reflections, admittedly I am finding it hard to do with my public writing lately. Besides some poems I have been working on, I have resisted writing more than usual lately. For me, resistance is like being physically overcome by what feels like a magnetic repulsion away from whatever (or whomever) I cannot bring myself to meet, face, get close to, or engage with. It’s almost as if I’m trying to protect myself with going over a cliff, burning my hands on a hot stove, or getting swept up in a current I know I cannot control. I can’t help it. The push from whatever I don’t want to be with feels primal.

I can feel myself resisting getting too close to the fire, and not entirely because I am afraid of being burned. What if the heat is too much for those I invite to the bonfire?

True to the title of my upcoming poetry collection, I am feeling drawn to the thin places these days, which means I feel more compelled to sit awhile in my inner world, thinking over some Big Feelings and Plans I have been planting seeds for the last year or two, plans that have not yet materialized and feelings that feel stuck.

I find myself feeling lonely much of the time because I don’t know who I can fully and freely talk to about these dreams and schemes. I don’t particularly want to share the full extent of these things yet, or maybe ever. So many times when I’ve walked or written poetry, I can feel a desire to speak and write all that is churning in my chest aloud or on the page here, but when I get to sitting down at my computer, the sea of my mind’s eye becomes choppy and I find I can no longer stand on the beach any more trying to sort out sentiments long enough to get them down in a way that feels coherent, or frankly, appealing to share with others. I retreat inland.

I have planned to sit down to write more times this spring than I can count, feeling desperate to tell some of the stories that I have been living out in private lately, so that they can live somewhere other than my own body and mind. When I do sit down, my relief doesn’t last long. I find that I can’t write them out; they feel too intimate. I walk away. Whatever bits and bobs I came to my desk with, hoping to release, are still being clutched in my hands. With nowhere much to put them, I squirrel these scraps away, as if I’m building a nest for a far-off time in the future that will bring me a sturdier sense of home.

At some point, I am drawn back to try to write about them, and so the process repeats itself, like the chorus of a song on repeat and the verses nowhere to be found. My nest grows, and it becomes easier and easier to hid inside of it instead of showing myself in the sky. It’s a cycle.