I’ve started talking to myself. I go for a walk and pretend I’m on a call, bright white hands-free cord plugged into my iPhone. At first I felt tentative, but now I’m good at it.
I imagine I’m talking to a friend. Sometimes I imagine I am talking to you.
I allow all the words to come out. The tangled thoughts and circling questions, the major and minor emotional chords. Sometimes the words come out in a way that feels so unexpectedly right my breath catches with the discovery of some new insight. The pieces snap into focus.
I have always written. I have a love of settling in with a notebook and allowing words to spin themselves out of my pen.
But when I release them into the air, rather than capture them on the page, I find a physical intimacy — an immediacy and dimension to the words and all they carry.
The words resonate within my bones and muscles. I feel them in my gut and on my skin. They fill my breath, my throat. I taste them on my tongue. I shape them with my mouth. I feel which words stick and hesitate, and which rush out so fast. There is a vibration, a pulse, and a swift lightness to speaking that is unlike the creation of written words. I feel emotions and thoughts with physical rhythm, with aliveness and heat. It feels good.
Something wants to be spoken. Practice saying it.
The words that stick in your throat, practice saying them.
The words that feel uncertain and terrifying, practice speaking them.
Let your body feel how it feels to say all the words.
Be curious. Savor all of it.
Kim Nicol 