The Balcony

In my private place of pretty things that grow, I’m seeking permission to spread joy. Not on a grand scale but on a tiny but massively significant place that I now sit tapping words that I have wanted to speak for so long. At the beginning of this journey that I never choose nor wanted, I was terrified and broken and I was lost for words. I am a being of the human kind that has guts made up of words and they are often all I have, so to lose them, meant I too was lost. In this endless loop of depression I understand at the core of that being that I am, that finding those words again was my only way off this ring road. Through seven years of more up and downs and snakes and ladders that I care to remember, I understand that my state of mind will always be a part of who I am yet my understanding and acceptance of this has also allowed the possibility that I could still live within the confides of that mental illness. I mean live, really live and love what that living provides. I learnt the hardest of ways that life doesn’t come with an instruction manual for a reason, and that being that no path, no way and no intention is greater than the other. My mud map no matter how coarse and dirty cannot be owned, or even followed by another as it is with my hands that it is drawn which makes it perfect in all its blaring mistakes and heartache. My path is mine and mine alone and it is up to me to have the bravery to follow it. Some people never realise this and spend a lifetime in the skin of another’s thinking that another’s path is more righteous, worthy or acceptable than their own. It saddens me to see the cookie cutters of the world spend a lifetime on being someone else. If being myself is all I ever achieve then I have not wasted a second of this life. That alone will be enough. But back to the joy, back to the words that are finding their way out into the world once more. Back to the ring road and the right turn that has just appeared before me in the shape of a university placement offer. In less than a few weeks I will begin my Masters in Creative Writing and I will write again. Seven years ago I was writing a heartbreaking play about a friend that killed himself and the words nearly in turn killed me. I opened up a spiral and fell within it which led to the hardest times of my life where I was fighting for a life that I didn’t want without the energy to care for the outcome. I was up against it and lost to the battle in an attempt to win an unwinnable war. It took me years to realise that the object what not to win the war but to simply learn to survive the battles to come. For years I believed that being creative meant that I was opening up the black hole and letting the demons in, standing too close to the cliff, dancing on the railing without a safety wire. I turned my back on my only great love and it left me without a purpose, a reason, a beat. It lead me into depression but I know more than anything I have ever known before that it will be the one thing to steady my ship in this never ending rough sea. These words that are yet to come are my one and only secret weapon. For the first time in the longest of times I will become myself once more. I have a feeling that it will be something even I couldn’t have imagined as I am now writing with insights that only soldiers have. So here I sit, with anticipation, in a private place of pretty things that grow and I sense a future that is now rushing and gushing with something that has been missing for years – words, words and more words. The best is indeed yet to come and it is never too late to start again even for those covered in scars.