Ode to Truthful Writing

Dear Shauna.

I know this may sound odd and just a bit creepy, but I think you became my “friend” at just the right time. Somewhere in the deeper, and more obsessively creepy areas of my soul I feel like I could never be thankful enough for more truthful and colorful writing. As if it is a secret meant especially for me.

There are quiet moments when I realize that books are a special kind of friend to me. Like a reflection of the life I need to know, of places and loves and losses that need to be added to the running tab of stories I keep in my heart. Somehow, that ragged comfy green chair in the corner of my living room brings me to another place entirely when I am holding a book in my hand, a cup of tea in my other and sitting at just the right angle.It is then, with truthful and deep writing staring me straight in the eyeballs, I can really let be what is.

In moments when I need to be reminded that love and loss are as equally linked as passion and pain, I find it written there.

In moments where I need the solidarity of the choices I made in college and the woman I am facing today, the moments where I recognize that at my best my strengths have created a more beautiful earth and at my worst my weaknesses have wounded people as if I have laser-eyes, I find it written here.

When I need to remember how to love him, Jared, that is. How to hold his hand and just be. How to say just the right thing or smile and rest on his shoulder just the right way, or how to say “you are my family and my love.” I see it spoken there.

If insecurity is fighting its way through my too-soft-around-the-edges body, or my talk-too-much-love-too-little brain, I see a glimmer of hope for myself here.

When I need to be reminded that at my most radiant it is about loving people not pleasing them, creating not demolishing, eating and tasting not depriving, I see something truthful speaking in those pages.

There is a solidarity that I do not deserve and cannot explain in between the painted cardboard binding of books. There is a place for me to cry without embarrassingly wiping up my tears and apologizing.

There is a place to imagine free of judgment and questions. But most importantly there is a place to be reminded of the woman I want to become. The way I want to live and love. The way I want passion and zest and to fight back when life starts kicking me. There is a way I want to grow up but stay young in my rawest, most tender parts.

There is beauty in truthful writing. A secret to be found and a smile that can only be shared with the black and white page before me. But, at the most perfect moment, this is all I need.

So thank you, Shauna, for being one of many who lets me creepily bond with your writing. Thank you for bearing your soul in such a way that truly, I believe, even if it is forever in the pages of my dearest books, we are kindred spirits.