I moved away from my hometown in February and I’ve been trying to write about it ever since. I just can’t seem to put it into words. Or at least, the right words. Leaving a place you call home, whether it is a hometown or a person or even a local coffee shop closing down, comes with a lot of feelings.
Sadness? Relief? Confusion? Anger? If you look up “a word for a lot of emotions” you will simply find “overemotional”. I always try to define myself with real words that have real, definite definitions. Overemotional is definitely fitting, but not what I was looking for.
At what point can we start making up new words?
In “The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse: In the Beginning”, Kruger suggests that we start over.
“The point is: you can’t get committed to the mess.”
I have been getting overly committed to the mess.
I have a lot of these half-completed, half-hearted misunderstandings of poems about my hometown that I am scared to touch because they are from those very first moments of leaving. They are, in ways, raw, but, in other ways, just beginnings.
My biggest takeaway from this Punk the Muse article is there will never necessarily be an ending in creative work. There is only a “continual beginning, and any apparent completion or accomplishment along the way is meaningless unless it is a new beginning.”
In art, and in life in general, it feels like there needs to be this moment of “ah ha! I’ve done it!” or “I’ve made it!” The reality is that moment probably won’t happen, and if it does, art and life keeps moving and keeps changing. You must move with it. You must keep adapting and turning the page. You must turn any accomplishment into growth.
So, half-begrudgingly and half-excited, I turn back the pages in my journal. I realize that I have grown a lot from those raw, depressed, beginning moments of blooming. And it’s allowing me to think about the journey in leaving instead of intensely focusing on the place I was saying goodbye to.
The process!!! That is exactly what Kruger was saying.
I rooted myself in this journey and process while writing a new poem about leaving. It is unfinished and definitely not perfect, but it doesn’t need to be. It is just a new beginning. It is just a new attempt at a new perspective of this time in my life.
I challenge you to also follow these ‘rules’ that Kruger suggests:
“So, today, my punksters: begin something. If you’ve been working on a project, find something in it to start over. Take something you’ve been working on and mess it up, attack it fresh: let go! let go! let go!
And then, just for the hell of it, no matter how busy you are, make a start on something new, no matter how absurd it seems. Write a page of notes for a new novel. Plan a vacation you never expect to take. Start an impossible project like, say, learning to sail or fly an airplane. Begin it.”
Begin today, then keep beginning. Humans are often expected to continually grow at a rapid increase, often in just one area of expertise. But today, just begin.
Top, featured image by Todd Thomas Brown, via Punk the Muse