Giving and Taking and Balancing and Falling

I’m tired of writing about the cataclysm of last year and how much I’ve grown since then. I’m tired of this sunshine echo in my poetry and prose. I’m tired of trying not to seem pretenious, but in the process of doing so, sounding even more pretentious than the beginning. While this new voice is mine, the words feel foreign coming from my lips. I know how write of candid vulnerability, of heartache and contemplation; I don’t know how to exist in an absence of anguish or how to articulate peace.

I’m exhausted by all these bright and bouncing words because every time I try to write, all I hear is “We get it, Arden – you’re happy. Can we have the kind of poetry we came here for, written by and for the always aching hearts? Or do you not know how to write that kind of content anymore? Did you already use up every metaphor and any ounce of symbolism left in your veins? Have you already sold out, at the mere age of nineteen?”

I am so completely and utterly terrified that this is it for me. That if I want to be happy, I have to sacrifice writing and my career. If I want to keep those, then I must be willing to let myself live in pain, constantly aching for the sake of my work. Poetry and sanity seldom go hand and hand, so I guess it was lofty of me to think I could be the first to find the balance.