About feeling too much, a personal letter on sorrow and creation

The other morning I was thinking how much I have been forced to face in the last years, and I was not even complaining in my solitude but thinking: words, the act of writing, putting down all my raw and sorrowful emotions on a page of paper has always saved my mind. A person who feels too much, people say, as if it were something to be solved. But what a beautiful compliment to be understood as a person who feels and is moved and is overwhelmed by emotions. Some months ago I decided, after even more months of thinking about it and repenting, that I wanted to try to put my poems somewhere, as a terrible act of undressing the soul. I’m now trying to navigate that process.

If I examine my identity more closely, I see that I have always wanted to capture in words and images whatever is swirling in my mind. My work, my academic writings —largely focused on ancient Greece— are part of this, too, if viewed closely; my passion and near-feverish devotion to the texts of ancient Greece are essential to what I feel and believe. But there has always been another side: desperate words I need to pour onto the page, poems written not out of love, but born of despair or abandonment, of death and mourning. If I am someone who feels too much, then every word I tear from my very core is part of those intense emotions and constitutes my only way of going on.

This brief glimpse into my private world is merely a pretext for saying that I need and want to talk about this here; I believe it is important to share these everyday moments. For a brief instant, I felt insecure, thinking this had nothing to do with the essence this space has represented until now; yet the truth is that everything is connected, and this intimacy is inextricably linked to literature, ancient texts, art, and that thirst for knowledge which defines this little corner.

And this is not about sharing those words that feel so intimate, not yet, not necessarily, but to connect in a different way and to be able to free some fears that are always part of the creative process. I think about this beautiful line in The Hours movie when Richard, in a total state of desperation, says to Clarissa that he wanted to write about everything, every detail, every emotion and feeling.

“I wanted to write about it all, everything that happens in a moment,” he says, and this incapacity of doing is what destroys him. It is a feeling so real and so recognizable, that uncertainty when we face the reality of knowing that it does not matter how much we strive; there are facets of light and death, facets of emotions that we are unable to bring out and transmit, but still, we feel them so deeply.

And it is impossible for me to find the words, or the courage to write about some details, some moments, brief instants of terror, but I try, and I weave certain words that give a little light on the pain, and I hope that someday another person could perhaps find some comfort and recognition in those same words that keep me here right now.

And all of this is just to say that I’m trying to start a new journey and that I have never felt so insecure and terribly scared, but still, willing.

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