I’ve been a bit MIA lately on my blog.

I go through phases where I internalize things and it takes a breakthrough of some kind to pop the cork and allow the pressure to escape in a fountain of liquid bubbles of thoughts and words.

I went to dinner last night with two of my besties. Some words that had been contained for a while escaped but I mostly listened and enjoyed allowing my lovies to share their own feelings and release pressures of their own in their own way. I do share bits and pieces of myself with those intimately close but often my emotions are channeled in basic ways that only the most trusted individuals know and understand.

We all have our own way.

I often listen to the pressures of others. I am able to allow their troubles to pass through me. I feel their pain, joy and struggles and then most of the emotion scatters like dust in a ray of sunlight,  and the words and memory of the conversation remains almost verbatim…if that makes sense. If they only know what they share and how it clings to me like tiny invisible particles of light and darkness that my soul retains.

Without being able to describe exactly what has been happening in my day to day life that has kept me away, I can share the emotion part by saying I’ve been feeling blessed, worried, anxious, frustrated, confused, concerned, hopeful and loved. Strange combinations of things from day to day. But isn’t that what living is all about?

I don’t expect to be happy all of the time. I don’t expect to feel content or unsettled either. I do believe though that this bottle of bubbles is due to my inability lately to write as much as I normally do. I’ve been so busy out in the real world that I haven’t had the time to focus and write that I have had in recent months. Book launch, marketing, brain storming and life’s usual callings have whittled down those precious hours.

Some people play golf, run, paint, dance or scream…I have to write.

Writers have to write or they’ll go crazy. We have to pop that cork and pour out our soul into a glass. We have to raise the glass and watch the bubbles rise and swirl around until we tip them to our lips and swallow them down again…one sip at a time. They become something else. They liquefy and settle and become clear until we’re drunk on all of the feelings and can finally put them in the right order to where they make sense…and we give it all to total strangers who over the course of thousands of words FINALLY give us the true release.

That’s when the story gets told. That’s where the tears and the laughter live. The circumstances that created the pressure and bubbles, fade away and all we’re left with are how those incidents made us feel and why we bottled them up to begin with.

Then, they become someone else’s feelings–someone else’s woes and triumphs and failures. We pour them into words and create worlds where those feelings can run free and be expressed without having to put a cork in them and then we hand them out into the world in hopes that the world will accept them.

…accept us.

…and when the bottle is empty…we fill it again.