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JustRachel

Touch Grass Little Miss Smart A**

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I recently saw a video where this life or acting coach helped people free themselves from trying to “be cool” by acting so foolish that they couldn’t fake being cool anymore. It immediately freed them from their ego and allowed them to get back to being themeselves etc. & I need that. So. That said, the following chaos is 100% intentional. Welcome back.

I have been stuck. For a while. Well, not “me” physically. I’m not stuck. To be clear: I am not stuck physically,

(as an aside: quick sand isn’t as much of a problem as scooby doo led me to believe it would be growing up—I also don’t get offered free drugs to say no to so…)

but, I am in my writing. To reitterate: I am not stuck but my writing is. My writting is dramatically stuck in… Limbo? In editing mode. In drafts. In random word documents and journal entries and notes app notes. Point is…my writing has been stuck. All of it. Everything. For a while.

And even writing this is starting to feel like nails on the chalkboard because the other versions I created were so much more neat and tidy—and incomplete—but thats not the point—and even if it was, they, those neat and tidy, and unfinished versions, wouldn’t help me break the habit I am trying to break so here we are. Here we are, back at it again… *sighs* Hi. What’s up. It’s been a minute. Hi.

Anyway…A couple years back I fell into the terrible habit of writing to “sound smart”—which mostly just makes me feel dumb because no matter how pretty it is or how nicely it rolls off my tongue or tickles my brain, it isn’t me.

I mean it is… but it isn’t.

It is… but it takes forever and it’s too polished. It’s too intentioned and it’s not as fun and at this point it’s honestly kind of annoying. So here we are.

There was a time in my life where I could sit down and write pages of content. Poems and plays and novels in november and I loved it. It was freeing and it was fun. It didn’t feel as hard, it didn’t feel like work…It was just, fun. But I already said that so…

Let me try again…

I used to be a good writer. Self proclaimed, most days, but I guess other people liked it too? Which isn’t the point… the point is—I used to be a good writer, not because people liked it, but because I had something to say. Something to get out. I had stories to tell.

And it didn’t always make sense, it was rarely written for the masses but it meant something to me and it saved me from myself more than once. Then somewhere along the way I got stuck. I got tripped up by wanting to sound smart or not say anything controvercial or… be “good enough.” But doing all that killed my voice and ruined my writing.

So here we are! Rambling… with the intention to publish said ramblings and get out of my own way and get out of this funk. Hopefully.

Fact of the matter is this—Sounding smart or at least wanting to sound smart hasn’t gotten me anywhere. It has only held me back in my writing.

So here I am, trying something new, rolling with the stream of concious, not trying to sound smart, or edit too much and at the end I will hit send and then I’ll do this again and again and again. Or try to. Until I fix myself.

Until I can write as me. Until I can stop trying to just “sound smart” and just be smart. Or at the very least be me. Until I can tell my ego to “suck it,” respectfully, of course.

Wish me luck!

JustRachel

On Healing

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I’ve mentioned before that I once saw a quote on my facebook wall that a friend posted around the time she had her first child. It read, “We all just want to give our kids lives they don’t have to heal from.” And given recent events, the overturning of Roe, the clear beeline being made toward attacking the rights and lives of LGBTQ+ people, a new perspective dawned on me.

We all want to give our kids a life they don’t have to heal from, sure, but the irony of the statement is that we ourselves are living proof that, broken or whole – we heal.

So what does this mean in the context of what is happening today? Well I suppose it would be natural to make the connection and just say, “we heal” but I’d argue that saying that, after knowing the extent and the ramifications of recent supreme court actions is incredibly tone-deaf.

You see, if I were to say “we heal,” as a declaration, or as a distinct statement regarding next steps – as if it were that simple, I would be diluting the actual gravity of the situation.

To say, “we heal” as a and in the tone of “just” statement – to insinuate that a 10 year old girl, who was r*ped by her father and had to get an abortion out of state because her state outlawed it after 6 weeks, needs to “just heal” is inherently insensitive and tactless and far too on-brand with aggressive and radical republican christian values for my liking. In other words, it gives “you are in our thoughts and prayers” and that is just no longer acceptable.

So instead… we fight.

We fight not only for our rights to merely exist as we are and have full bodily autonomy like the men do, but we fight for the right to heal despite the odds and the laws being against us. We fight for the right to survive this deeply barbaric assault on our freedoms and our bodies and we fight to forgive those who thought for a single moment that they could take them — and to be clear we don’t fight to forgive them because they deserve it, we fight to forgive them because when we boil it down, we don’t really forgive others for them – especially in cases like these where they don’t deserve it, but we forgive others for ourselves. we fight to forgive them because the anger is too heavy and it will only slow us down.

Healing isn’t a linear path but it’s one many of us will be on for much of our lives – because the fact of it all is, whether or not our parents or our country give us a life that we have to heal from – we will fight and we will heal.