Prompt #48 is to do a 5-minute freewrite with the phrase "Anger suffers as grief withdraws." I admit not to knowing what a freewrite was until I looked it up on wikipedia. Basically, it seems like the idea is to just write, keep the pen moving or the keys hammering for a certain amount of time. Spelling or grammar or even making sense is unimportant. It's not generally supposed to be actual writing, but a kind of warm-up exercise for the writer's benefit. I admit to having written what follows elsewhere and then looking through it to make sure I didn't say anything I wouldn't want to make public before copying it here.
This whole public freewrite thing is, frankly, terrifying.
Anger suffers as grief withdraws. I think anger points often points to forgiveness or where forgiveness should be anyway. Anger is sometimes something more, though. I get angry a lot it seems, and I don't like it. I try to avoid it when I can.
Sometimes, I think grief is something I can live without, and sometimes I think it makes things better somehow. Like marking where something is wrong. When that emptiness goes, it seems like there ought to be some mark. When the grief drops away, when the sting of it vanishes, or subsides, it seems like there ought to be something else there.
But when grief withdraws, makes itself small so that you don't notice it anymore, don't feel the emptiness as much, then it's hard for anything to go there. Not anger, not happiness, not anything but just numbness, like a drug, like part of your nervous system was just cut away.
It's hard to think sometimes. Anger doesn't really suffer. At least my anger just makes me suffer. I don't like being angry. I avoid it when I can. I don't like talking politics with people who just try to get angry. A lot of times that what I see people doing: doing politics and getting angry, like the enjoy the anger, relish it. They pick a side, and it really doesn't matter whic, but they just get angry at the other side. It's liek a game.
Sometimes, I think grief is something I can live without, and sometimes I think it makes things better somehow. Like marking where something is wrong. When that emptiness goes, it seems like there ought to be some mark. When the grief drops away, when the sting of it vanishes, or subsides, it seems like there ought to be something else there.
But when grief withdraws, makes itself small so that you don't notice it anymore, don't feel the emptiness as much, then it's hard for anything to go there. Not anger, not happiness, not anything but just numbness, like a drug, like part of your nervous system was just cut away.
It's hard to think sometimes. Anger doesn't really suffer. At least my anger just makes me suffer. I don't like being angry. I avoid it when I can. I don't like talking politics with people who just try to get angry. A lot of times that what I see people doing: doing politics and getting angry, like the enjoy the anger, relish it. They pick a side, and it really doesn't matter whic, but they just get angry at the other side. It's liek a game.
This work by Timothy H. Ruppel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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