writing.

Always Love a Little Harder.

/ kaley walls / Leave a comment

Preface: I wrote this back during the fallout of the Las Vegas shooting. At the time, I wasn’t sure I’d said everything I wanted to or that I got it out right. I have a tendency to write things and then let them sit, percolate, evolve. But today, while the timing might be a bit delayed, the concepts are still true and the sentiments are still how I feel.

Last year, I changed things up and didn’t go with the traditional resolutions because, let’s face it, what I’d resolve to do or not do would last maybe four days. Instead, I decided to pick a theme for the year, something that fits how and what I want to accomplish in the upcoming 365 days. So, while I’m a day late on releasing this, here is 2018’s theme: be brave and love harder.

Enjoy, and happy 2018.

-kw

life-863186_1280

I’ve stared at this blinking cursor for the last hour and a half.

I don’t know what I want to say, what I should say, what I shouldn’t. Are my words even worth putting down on paper? Who knows. I’m struggling with articulating what it is the world is going through right now, and I’m not sure I even understand it all that well myself.

It’s almost as if we’re entering into a moral dark age, where love and kindness are no longer the appropriate currency to make it through. When did that even happen? When did we get so off course?

I realize that this isn’t the first mass shooting in US history or the first major incident in the world. Sadly, things like the shooting in Vegas are becoming common occurrences in our collective experience and something none of us should be used to. My heart hurts for the people who have and will experience some kind of loss or terror or horror from this one single event. My heart hurts for the world. My heart just hurts. Something as pure as attending a concert has been sullied, the communal high and sense of inclusion music brings truncated by a guy sitting on the 32nd floor shooting into a crowd. We don’t know why yet, but does it really matter? Will that knowledge somehow help us? I don’t think so. How could you possibly reason that this was necessary or good or deemed?

So, I ask: are we becoming comfortable with the dark? Do we expect it? Should we expect it? Moments of intense fear tend to make us wary about the future and continuing to do things we enjoy, like attending concerts or festivals or simply walking down the street.

I was in London when the bombing at the Ariana Grande concert happened in Manchester. I was nowhere near the epicentre, but the ripples still reached me. I could feel London tense, tighten, hold its collective breath. Will it happen here? Are we next? Are there others? The police presence was unbelievable and every time sirens blared, I felt myself tense, too. Are they responding to another attack, or is this an ordinary call? Despite my best efforts to enjoy the rest of my trip because, well, fear be damned!, I still got caught up in the anticipatory feeling of what’s to come. I walked around with my actual passport; I mapped my various routes to the Canadian embassy; I didn’t take the tube; I stayed away from major tourist attractions.

And despite those efforts, I still managed to find myself in the middle of a crowd outside Buckingham Palace with a police helicopter slowly hovering above us. I was uneasy; the crowd was overwhelming. And in that moment I realized they still got me. I was fearful. I mistrusted the people around me. I gauged my exits and who I would have to work around to get out of this situation, if something were to happen.

And maybe that’s the true power of inciting terror. The tendrils of fear creeping through the people, changing their perceptions of their peers into faces of “the other.” Diminishing the trust in love and light, demanding we wrap ourselves in the dark. We divide ourselves based on our instincts to survive, but I think our best chance of survival is to fight that. To love, to trust, to believe in the good in people. To maybe not believe everything you see or hear in mainstream media, or to at least read it critically. To actively evaluate your moral compass and make adjustments as needed.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that love will always win, but we’re venturing down a path that scares me. Will we be able to overcome our distrust of the other and what we don’t know or understand? Will we realize that the “other” may not be who we’re taught to expect? I don’t pretend to think that every human is essentially good and can be saved. That’s just not the case, and I understand that. But when will we get down past the colour of someone’s skin or religious ideologies to realize that, at the end of the day, we all bleed the same? And maybe that’s easy for me to say as single, white, 30-year-old female sitting in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, but I believe it. And while you may not believe me, I don’t see colour or religion or gender or sexual orientation. I see human. And humans are capable of an array of things, ranging from the indescribably horrific to the unbelievably beautiful. Let one’s actions determine the judgement and, if you must, label him or her as “human,” not “lone wolf” or “terrorist” or “white” or “Muslim.”

I have to believe that we’re more sophisticated beings and that love is our greatest power, but sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I wonder if we can do it, fight the divisive nature of fearfulness. I hope to hell we can and do, but sometimes, I wonder.

So, today, on this day and going forward, love a little harder. Always love a little harder.

Because it’s truly the only thing that will save us.

How Loss Shapes Who We Are

/ kaley walls / Leave a comment

Loss is a funny thing.

For starters, it’s an immensely individual experience. Six people can live through the same tragic event and come out with six mind-blowingly different experiences. Hell, there will be six different memories of said event. We might be able to relate to each other, using the event as common ground, reaching out and around each other, but sometimes, loss leaves us alone. Isolated. Even in a room full of people, you are simply tied to your experience, wondering if you will actually ever break away.

Loss, Sadness, Goodbye

While the good helps shape who we are, sometimes I think it’s the losses that give us the most.

Losses can be big, small, in between. You may not even recognize what you’re experiencing as loss. Sometimes you only realize it’s a loss after the fact and after you’ve put some serious time and space between where you are and what happened.

I think we have this tendency to consider death as the only real loss in this life, but that’s just simply not the case. We experience varying degrees of loss on a daily basis, some leaving a bigger impact than others. Sometimes you don’t even realize the string of events that have led to this feeling of calamitous loss until you’re looking back down the road wondering how in the hell you got here in the first place.

These last five months have been a fucking roller coaster for me. Well, 2017 as a whole, let’s just say. Some great things, some really exciting things, some less great things, some terribly awful things. You know, a good mix. But it wasn’t until I really started looking at the last 10 weeks, really, that I’ve started to realize the amount of loss I’ve experienced in a relatively short amount of time.

Some things you just don’t see until you’re looking back.

And it’s not a fucking wonder that I’ve made a Kaley-shaped dent in my couch and have only ventured outside when I needed to. While some people turn to the world when they’re going through bouts of stress or emotional strain, I turn inward. I turn away from people, from the world, from just about everything. I eat my feelings, and that usually means beer and cheeseburgers sans vegetables, so all in all, a real great kick to my system. My brain gets so fucking loud that I lose myself in Netflix to disconnect and shut things off for awhile. But that lifestyle is habit forming. It becomes my go-to reaction, and it’s not necessarily a good thing. Well, not even necessarily. It’s not a good thing.

But the good news about smashing along rock bottom and exploding into several large pieces of myself is that I get the chance to put things back together. Maybe better this time. Maybe not. That’s the joy and curse of these opportunities, the unknowing. On more than one occasion in recent days, I’ve cried enough to leave myself with swollen eyelids and a constant burn around my irises. But I’m purging. I’m getting that toxic, negative load out of me. I’m fighting through the internal mayhem, setting fire to what needs to go down in flames.

But with that purge comes loss. Experiences, relationships, friendships, connections will all morph, change, alter. Sometimes they can make it through and grow with you, and sometimes they can’t. Sometimes they come back, and sometimes they don’t. I’ll tell you, though, it’s brutal when people come back, but they’re just not sure. (So, be sure, eh?)

There’s this quote I have that says, “we live life forward but understand it backward.” And I’m not sure that there’s anything more true. Moments or experiences act as triggers which tumble down entire shelves of memories, bringing things you’d tried your damnedest to forget into stark clarity, forcing you to confront some things that you thought you’d simply take to the grave.

Are we better for it, for having to face those things? I don’t know. I really don’t. From where I’m standing at this particular moment in time, I honestly wish my shelves were still intact, everything neatly packed away in their appropriate boxes. Leaving me to live my life in peace.

But is that truly peace, or is it just a false sense of security? I find myself trying to make that distinction, make that decision. Do I step outside of the rubble and step into the version of myself that has absorbed these losses, morphed into something better, maybe something stronger? Or do I patch things up? Duct tape a piece of soul here, super glue a crack of heart there. Neither seems particularly appealing.

Loss comes in all shapes and sizes, but usually the holes it leaves feel dark and heavy.

And all to familiar.

I’m scared I’ll never be the same if I step forward, out past this demolition scene. I’m scared of what kind of person I will be, that maybe I’ll lose or leave something behind that I’ll never be able to retrieve.

And maybe that’s the biggest act of bravery, those timid steps we take into the light, not knowing whether we will truly be better or worse for it. Not knowing what waits for us on the other side. Running the risk to achieve the great, right?

Only time will tell.

 

I Don’t Write Every Day. Ever.

/ kaley walls / Leave a comment

It’s true. I don’t write every day. Hell, I barely can write a couple of times a week. Over the years, I’ve tried my damnedest to, at minimum, journal every day because, well, at least that’s something, right? A quick synopsis of my day, or a commentary on some trivial event, or a kernel of some thought I need to unpack. I string the days together for awhile, do a really great job of writing in there every single day.

Then, BAM! Six, or 16, days roll on by, and I lead off with, “Well, so much for that run,” or some variation of “Man, I’m really bad at this writing thing.”

writing, creative writing, creative process

When not writing is still writing.

I spend a lot of time berating myself for not being a “better writer,” wondering why in goodness’s name I can’t do this “right.” My voice of self-criticism is an awfully loud one, and I think she has the power to scare away my inspiration, my will to write, my desire to create something different.

And then I read this article this morning from Electric Literature, answering a reader’s question on whether he or she is still a writer even if he or she doesn’t write every day.

And the resounding answer was, “Yes! Of course!”

The article is broken down into things you can do while you’re not writing, that ultimately help your writing, and it really spoke to me. When I’m not writing, I have more time for reading, for experiencing, and for thinking. Any and all of those three things can serve for fodder for future scribbles. If I’m not reading, then I’m not challenging and expanding my writer’s tool kit. If I’m not experiencing, then I’m not living life and giving myself something to write about. If I’m not thinking, then I’m not percolating new ideas or patterns or coming to absorb those readings or understand those experiences. And if I’m not doing any of that, well, then, what’s there to write about?

Creativity is, and always be, an incredibly individual pursuit. What works for one writer completely stalls and holds up the next. And let’s not even talk about the process of the third! It takes all kinds of crafts and artists to bring beauty into this sometimes (okay, often) ugly world, and the comparisons between two artists is something that hampers that beautiful, creative offering.

At the most basic level, each of us, every single human on this piece of rock, has a story and we’re all trying to figure out a way to explain it and/or share it. The creatives feel their stories, experiencing the words or the music or the drawings individually and completely. So, if my story and creative process is unique, then how come I’m so worried I’m “doing it wrong?” In theory, there should be no wrong way. Because, in the end, it will have culminated in something worthy of being in the world, even if I took a different route to get there, right?

So, I’m told.

But still I struggle with this feeling of being a fraud, even with a double major in Creative Writing and English Literature. I literally majored in writing and reading and still, still, I find myself fighting against my creativity. To the point that I’ve wondered if I am even a creative person at all or if it was a lie I told myself.

This article this morning, though, released a weight I didn’t even realize I was carrying. I do things differently than other writers, but that’s okay. That doesn’t make me any less of a writer. Because when I do write, it feels so good, a tantalizing piece of my soul that I can play with, hear what she has to say. It’s a cathartic process that somehow clears the debris of my muddled brain and gives me some semblance of clarity, especially if I’m mulling over a specific trouble or quandary.

So, while I might not write every day, I do still write. I do turn away from my craft when the rest of my world gets overwhelmingly chaotic, but I always, always come back to it. And maybe that’s the point: it’s my returning that makes me the writer, not so much the fact that I don’t write every day.

What’s your favourite way to get back into your writing process? I’d love to hear it.

Until next time.

-kw.