Poem by Romi Endelmanis // Photograph by Daniella
Poem by Romi Endelmanis // Photograph by Daniella
I write to stop myself from feeling like I should be writing. I should be doing so many things but not one of them feel the way they used to.
I ink out words as a way of understanding myself and with each capital the pressure builds:
to edit
to quieten
to work better and faster and longer and harder because my failing passion is held captive by my fear, the knowledge that I am not good enough, not wise enough, am not enough.
So I hold a pen and look at anything but the paper, hoping any moment now I’ll come alive and my fingers will be dripping with ink and I will know, at last, that this is it! I’m back. The words aren’t who I want to be, they’re who I am and for a little while I won’t even wonder how long it will last.
But for now: I ignore that blank page like an acquaintance I don’t want to see. I have six different pens ready, all of them wrong, and my mind is full of emptiness and the occasional reminder that I am not enough.
I tell myself that I want to do this. No one else set out those six pens, tea, pencil, eraser, journal, notepad, alternate journal, or created the list of things it would be ok to write about. Look how prepared I am! I should love this.
But my tea is getting cold, old, and-
an idea.
Nothing is so feverish as the way I tear into the paper, my words hurried and momentous and so very me, and it is wonderful. Until I start to wonder: is it? No, not that, not now, a selection of nots that compliment each other the way I want to compliment myself.
I turn my art into a self-doubt disaster, a paper doll cut and tweaked until it falls apart and I fall apart with it.
For now my truths stare at me out of blank paper. I can’t bring myself to stare back.
