Naming What Was Never Named

I write a ton of things, but can't name any of it. You title everything before you even begin.

I used to just write. Constantly, every moment my hands were free. Sometimes to escape anxiety, sometimes to release a sentence that had woken up inside me in a crowd but couldn't find its way out. To line up my dreams and fill in their details, to put my feelings into words, to analyze the past. Sometimes to build an identity, sometimes to demolish a belief. Always to question what seemed most certain. So that nothing would be planted in my world like a statue, fixed and immovable — I always wrote. Helplessness and happiness with the same pen, hope and disappointment, grief and contentment, always onto the same page.

Inadequacy used to eat at me back then. I thought I had no right to speak, that nothing I said held any weight. I believed even my footsteps left no mark. There was such a heaviness inside me — all the scales were liars, but all my weight pulled inward, my burden weightless to the world and crushing only to myself.

I always wrote in calories. I don't know how many calories I wrote today, but I was running a deficit. I watched what I ate too, kept things clean, chose carefully what sentences I let inside me. I walked so much that if I had walked in a straight line, my head would have collided with another planet. But all I managed was to trace circles on my own axis. I was obligated to write whatever poured out of me, like a laborer of words. I wrote and wrote — recognition was the next stage, and there was no time for that yet.

Reading back, I deleted what I had written. My insides were so bare that I was ashamed to look — I crumpled the pages and threw them into the fire. That's probably the best way to get rid of yourself. I read what remained, and I began giving names to those pieces. Every piece had its extremes — I would find that outermost point and choose it as the title.

Now, what am I doing here as I write: a feeling like my insides are completely empty. I choose a name first, then try to give birth to a child worthy of that name. Maybe that's exactly what a title is — something you name before it exists, then wait for it to arrive. Named before it is born, and born because it was named.