It all counts

"...what's redemptive about every relationship, is accepting this one truth - that it all counts, that the good and the bad are part of the alchemy of loving someone, the base elements break and boil and bleed, but one day there's gold. Then you are able to say, despite everything: I wouldn't be the person I am today if not for you." 

AMY HOLLINGSWORTH  from "Letters from the Closet"

I keep your letters in a box high up on a shelf. I need a ladder to get to them. It's better that way because I have a habit of glancing back over my shoulder, always trying to keep the past in view.
I dared to tell you once, how not a day goes by when you don't cross my mind. I hoped you'd understand, that you'd know I didn't say it to change anything but only because I was tired of skirting around the edges of myself, of trying not to remember and pretending none of it mattered. It all counts - that's the only way I can make sense of it, how I have never been able to lose sight of you after all these years. I thought I had to define it somehow: right/wrong, love/friendship, past/present... I thought maybe if I could just separate out the base elements I could undo whatever you are to me and never once look back again.
The truth is I carry you with me always, a part of who I was and who I am, where I've come from and where I'm going. I can't help but remember us, seventeen, an ocean apart, wanting and waiting for the distance to disappear. I think that seventeen year old me will always be waiting. Many years from now, when every hair on my head has turned grey and my life can be read from the lines on my face, there'll be a knock on the door. I'll answer it and you'll be standing there and I won't be surprised.
It will feel like a promise that in the end, despite everything, we kept.

Writing Down the Bones

“I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me... I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in my life...I am trying to come alive, to find the distance in my own recesses and bring them forward and give them color and form... I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only real home I'll ever have.” 

NATALIE GOLDBERG  from "Writing Down the Bones"

I stop writing down the bones and start to feel for them instead.  Watching the numbers fall away, I think I can keep myself from falling. It's not about wanting to be thin, but about trying to balance the weight of it all.  It started over half a lifetime ago when I carried hurt inside that felt like I'd been cut right open and sown up again with a belly full of rocks. I wanted nothing more then than to be pure spirit, to be free of all that held me down.

I write to make myself see these things, to remember how the scars were made and how the pain was fleeting. I'm a burden-carrier. I've always known it. But to carry the weight of others' broken I need to learn to carry my own. My strength lies in words. I forget it over and over again and forget to eat instead. I write to make sense of my life; to untangle the wild, crazy, bewilderingly beautiful mess of it all and hope that after the unravelling and the reravelling, the spinning and the weaving, I might yet count it all joy.