Alexithymia.

To
Whoever is reading this,

I sat in front of the desktop, with the keyboard in my lap, and stared at the blank screen for 45 minutes. I'm afraid it will always remain blank.

I type a sentence and then hit the backspace, erasing everything. Type. Erase. Repeat. Type. Erase. Repeat. Type. Erase. Repeat. My fingertips are bleeding now. Smearing the thick red blood on the keys. But I can't feel the pain. There's something else that is weighing me down. Something real heavy crushing my chest. It is called 'words' I believe. 

Have you ever felt this? This unsettling sensation of trying to get words out of you but they get stuck in your throat, choking you. It's almost making me breathless here. So many voices inside my head are screaming for attention, calling out to me to listen to them. And not one of them wants to listen to me. I want to tell them things, I know how to speak, I have a voice. But it is muted. 

Breathe. I have to keep reminding myself that I have to breathe. I have to seek what makes me think, what makes me happy and what makes me grow; take it all in. I have to put my thoughts into words, into paintings, into food, into everything that I do and let them all out. I'm not doing it for someone who will read this at some point and say "Oh, you have a flair for expressing yourself so well!" I have to do this to save myself from exploding under immense pressure of my own mind. I need to grope around this darkness, pick up some words along the way, string them into sentences even if I cannot figure out how and hush those voices down. It won't be easy. It never was easy. It will never be easy.

I will again have to type a sentence, again have to hit the backspace and erase everything that I ever managed to write again and again and again. Maybe I will lose a few hours of sleep, maybe I will get restless carrying all these feelings trapped inside me, maybe I will call a friend of mine and lament about how I lost the ability to communicate or maybe I will just give it up all together and quietly walk ahead like I couldn't care less.

But before that, I want to sit in front of the desktop, with the keyboard in my lap and stare at the blank screen for an hour at least and type. Type until my fingers bleed. Type until I cannot recognise the keys covered in my blood. Type until the weight melts away and the words flow like a river and I am finally relieved and healed. And then I guess the screen won't be blank anymore.

"Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares and who has once broken the spell of 'you can't'" ~ Vincent Van Gogh.