Emotional Trip

The other night an old friend made contact. We caught up and I learned their partner of over eight years had just cleared out, which was sad and a shock because there was a lot of love there.  It's obviously been on the cards a while as a number of tracks from an impending debut album were sent to me that evening. I listened, was deeply touched at the raw emotionality and moved by the lyrics, which were superlative and have been a consistent hallmark for this songwriter in the entire time I've known them.  I cried for a lot of reasons that night. And then I wrote.

We've not been in touch much in the last eight years but we were once very close. Close in that way that you are when you're emerging into so called adult relationships, where the years under your belt are supposed to assign you with some level of maturity but the reality often is you're still very much caught up in the heat and raw emotionality of being a teenager.

It's a raw time and it's a good time for that reason.  These are the years when we are often passionate enough to really want to confront our feelings, when our values are forming beyond that of our parents. We haven't yet put on all the layers and masks that we will later use to defend our emotional territory as adults. Often it's the last opportunity young women have to meet men at their most honest and the best time young men have to express themselves creatively before their interest in certain forms of communication becomes bogged down in restrictive ideals of 'adult' masculinity.

All through high school I dabbled in poetry and writing lyrics. Terrible stuff. Exactly the kind of self involved, shmalzty, broken hearted nonsense that you might expect from a teenage girl.  I wasn't a fan of poetry per say, I didn't consume it, study the greats or even understand it as a discipline. All I knew was that sometimes feelings were too big to hold in and too hard to talk about. So I wrote.

I tried keeping a journal but it never took because somehow when I tried to write factually about the things that were burning me up or keeping me awake or playing on my mind, they always sounded really trivial. That, of course, is because they were and I was at least self aware enough to recognise this but, when one is burning up over some boy or heartbroken because of the actions of a friend or confused as hell by the behaviour of adults - you don't necessarily want to acknowledge that it's silly and let it go immediately. Part of the great aspect of those years between 16-24 was the ability to really throw yourself into the emotional wash and go with it. So, poetry and song lyrics were a great outlet because I could present ideas in a new way. I could play with meanings and present my feelings like a pass-the-parcel, all wrapped in layers to be peeled away only by those that really understood me best.

Beyond the lyrics of popular music, (and lyrics always defined whether I liked a song or not), there was a singular poetic influence in Rod McKuen. My parents had several of his published collections and I was always struck by how he expressed feeling.  It should not have come as a surprise to me when decades later I discovered he is also an award winning song lyricist.

Looking back now, it seems odd that I did not pursue my personal affinity for poetry through to an academic study of it.  I used to blitz poetry units at school and more than once got almost perfect marks for my analysis of various works through the first three years of English lit at university. Where the perfect right and wrong of math always escaped me, poetry to me was like painting with words. I loved being able to unravel the mystery in a poets work - to try and decipher the message and the emotion being expressed.

There was a pretty strong scene on campus as well, but I didn't explore it. Once, I walked into one of the atrium areas on campus and there was a woman standing on a podium doing a reading. I can't recall the whole poem but I have always remembered this line..."I plucked a hair for every time you never called. Now look at me, I'm fucking bald..." Why is it my brain latched on this this image and can still recall the line and the woman and the look on her face when she spoke it? It is this of poetry and song lyrics I love - the ability to capture a single emotional moment in a few words.

I guess back then I didn't contemplate life as a writer, which is ironic, but it was also a deeply personal thing and I wasn't all that keen on having my deepest thoughts raked over by others. I recall another friend who was accepted into a very small and elite class for writers at University. She used to get physically sick when it was time to submit her work and the tutor and other class members were extremely harsh in their 'constructive' criticisms. Not for me and to this day there are only a handful of people that I have ever shown my personal collection of musings to.  Some I look back on and think "heyyyyy - ok" and the others are just cringe city but that's to be expected.

As years passed I wrote less and less of matters personal. I matured emotionally as well and found myself tormented less often, which is when I used to write what I viewed as my best stuff.  I think it was Pink who said she feels the stuff she writes when she is happy is crap. Ditto.

The last deeply personal piece I wrote was for a man a decade ago. And he misunderstood it so profoundly and completely that I should have heard the warning bells sounding on the relationship then and there. I've been blocked on expressing my own feelings in a poetic or lyrical form ever since.

To have been so touched and so moved by the work of someone else the other night that I actually upped pen and expressed was important. Something unlocked, more has come since then as well. So I am extremely grateful to my dear friend, who always knew how to tap into a part of me that others could rarely reach.

I'm still too chicken to put it out there even for my five loyal followers but maybe...one day...I'll get up the nerve. Until then, it's nice to be reminded that I can write about something other than boxes with blinky lights and cables and stuff...

When was the last time you wrote creatively?