Whoops, I haven’t posted anything lately. I got too precious with my words again.
There are a lot of things that I get precious about, physical and ephemeral. Words aren’t delicate; they’re staunch, sturdy things that bend and twist but don’t break. There is no debt of words, they are not finite, they do not come from a well so much as they come from clouds. Words are everything and everywhere.
Frankly, there will be a time when I’ve written my last word, read it, said it. I should use more of them, take advantage of the time I have until then. And yet, some part of me feels that putting words not carefully analyzed out into the world is a crime, a violation. So I tend to keep them to myself.
I think we all do this.
Take, for example, the hundreds, *hundreds*, of stickers I have that sit unused in desk drawers and folders and on bulletin boards and tucked into books. Selecting a location for them is too daunting, too overwhelming. What if I put my beloved chibi Alien sticker on a water bottle and promptly lose it? What if it goes through the dishwasher accidentally and the sticker is ruined?
The answer, of course, is get another sticker. There will always be more.
I do this with cool writing utensils, with fancy notebooks and sketchbooks and good perfume. I have artisanal soaps that are at least a decade old because the thought of ruining them with water is abhorrent. This is not good behavior! I say as I squirrel away another sample of fancy skin cream. It’ll expire before I use it, probably.
There are drafts of things long since expired, words I wrote, felt weren’t right, vowed to return to with an editor’s eye. They languish in drafts folders, in notebooks. I wrote a thing about the America 250 fiasco and then wandered off, too obsessed with improving it to publish it on time. I could have just put it out as-is and let it live. Instead I abandoned it to perish in darkness.
So here I am, public atonement for not maintaining the pace I’d wanted in publication exposure therapy, writing an essay about my inability to let my writing go instead of writing something else. I want to make a vow to myself, a promise and a threat, that there will never be a shortage of words. Throw them out there like chicken scratch. It’s good for me, even if they don’t always feel like perfection. Better to treat them like they’re not precious.