One Sunset at a Time

Writing is therapeutic for me. It calms me and heals me. I’ve kept journals for as long as I can remember. The things I write in these diaries are intensely private. Sometimes these things, these rants, fears, and confessions, are hard for me to read in retrospect as the words are, many times, born from pain and reading them easily reminds me of the pain I felt when I wrote them. Other times re-reading old entries shows me how I’ve grown and I feel relieved that whatever I was going through then is over. There are often big gaps between entries in these books because I tend to write in them less when I’m happy. Writing, especially when I’m upset, helps me see things clearly; it takes a burden off me having my worries, fears, heartaches, and frustrations written down.

I went through a time early last year of intense heartache. There were not even enough pages in my journal to help ease my burden. I existed for months in a state of persistent melancholy and I cried a lot. I cried a lot because I woke up every day and my chest felt heavy and as the day went on the sadness that weighed in my heart grew more intense as it was pumped and pumped through my body. And it was just too much to keep inside me. So I cried. I cried big heavy sobs that shook my body and hurt my stomach and made my eyes swell. I cried in an attempt to dispel the sadness, to purge myself of it.

And then spring came. Spring came and I knew it was time to pick myself up, if only slowly, and find a way to keep on living. It was time to stop crying. I recently read through my journal entries from those months and found one very short entry I wrote at the start of spring. I remember the day I wrote it and I know that was the moment I realized it was time to keep on living, the moment I first knew I was going to be OK.


Journal entry written 03/06/09:
Yesterday was full of wind, like 60 mph winds, and it didn’t die down until around sunset. It was a beautiful sunset and so quiet after such a windy day; and it gave me the smallest bit of peace. I texted Dad about it and he said sometimes you just have to take life one sunset at a time.


It was around then that the idea for Flower Blog first came to mind. I decided it was time to take my life back from my grief. There were certainly more tear laden days to come in the months that followed that journal entry but starting this blog was one of the first steps in rebuilding myself. I wanted to do more with my writing than just rant in a journal, and, besides, that didn’t seem to be curing me; this was bigger pain than I’d had in the past and it required bigger writing. It was about remembering who I am and what I want for myself, something I’d forgotten to do while I was grieving, something I’d forgotten to do a long time before the relationship I was grieving had ended, something that had probably, in part, led to its demise. 

Writing for Flower Blog reminded me how much writing makes me feel alive. And, while I can’t say writing alone brought me back to life, it was the first piece of many that drew me out of my sadness. Investing time and effort into my writing reminded me how important it is to nurture all the little pieces of me I discovered that spring and in the months that followed. Before, I had invested everything into my relationship and I had let many other things, including other relationships, fall away in order to do so. When the relationship ended I invested everything into mourning it. I know I will feel heartache again one day and I know I might even completely fall apart again, but I also know I will survive again. I know the winds will calm and the sun will set and I will keep on living.