“Procrastination as Part of the Process” by Gina Moriarty
I know I’m acting cowardly when I procrastinate taking a seat at my desk.
When I wash dishes that I typically neglect, when I dust my bookshelves and reorder my to-be-read… when I scrub the walls, I know I should be writing.
I must face the facts, that my writing process is meant to heal. To process. To forgive. To learn. To make sense of my heart, I must face my words.
I’ve scrapped enough first drafts to know, for me to process, I have to read my written words on paper, ingest them as my own curative soul food.
Writing is my way of digesting life.
When I recognize what I should write, once I identify the story that needs to be told, I tend to hide. I’ll bury myself in dirty laundry baskets sorting loss and heartache alongside mismatched socks.
I know I’ll never find balance this way.
So, when I find myself in the pantry, sorting my canned goods by alphabetical order or by expiration date, I know there’s an inkblot on my heart, one I’m avoiding stabbing my pen into.
I must remind myself, that when I merge my shadow, I won’t turn grey. No matter how much time passes, my ink will appear black on the white page. My heart must recognize that black isn’t void of color but remember the color black is composed of every hue on the spectrum. Every feeling, emotion, every energy absorbed.
I must remind myself that my ink is not black, or grey, or charcoal, not devoid of color or life or meaning, but an incorporation of yellows and blues and reds and purples, adding their own essence to collaborate, to bring shade to my darkness. I know the only way to move hearts with my words is if my own heart moves first.
Writing is not for the faint of heart. Writing is bravery in syntactic form.
As my yin and my yang blend, separated by metaphor and symbol, I’ve found I can take pause and write through the comma. I like to think that I write, not what I want to write, but what I need to write. I’ve found sometimes the most healing drafts, the ones where my tears dampen the page, are words I wrote for only my heart to read.
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Gina Moriarty’s Artist Statement: I am a writer, an artist, creative to the core. My background and my culture has been merged between Christianity, psychedelics, and my own spiritual journey. I’ve learned to work with what the universe sends my way.
