Back in my early twenties, when I was teetering into adulthood on not-quite stable legs, a film-making coworker approached me with a proposal. It involved smoldering and smoking, silence and tension, a bottled-up version of me filmed in black and white, riding scooters, taking deep drags off cigarettes, and enigmatically letting the smoke obscure me further.

We never made the movie. The point of it all escapes me, though in retrospect he clearly had a smoking fetish. But I do remember this idea of my containment, how I kept parts of myself under wraps. I carried tension just below the surface, ready to blow.

Thirteen years ago, I exploded. Words thrummed from my fingertips. I was compelled to create. In the process, I worked through some trauma, put a lot of my past to rest, went back to grad school, and became a therapist. The turmoil I created in my personal life during this intense time eventually died down–as did the writing.

I recently reread some early entries from this blog, writing from those gritty days of lava and ash, long since deleted from the online repository. Intensity and longing vibrate off the page. I no longer identify with that version of me, caught up in words and feelings. Or perhaps parts of that person feel too messy and unpredictable. To give in to her intensity would shake up my current equilibrium. Stability trumps emotional and artistic expression.

I grew up with an idea about what it meant to be a writer, about what went into being a word artist. Real writers were cruel and chauvinistic. They relied on the support of those whose self-sacrifice they both expected and insulted. Writers dealt in instability. Unprocessed trauma was their bread and butter, and they fed off anger and lust. My early writing didn’t totally spring from this dysfunctional well, though I was angry and desperate to be seen, bruises, scars and all. Through my writing, I did not ignore my trauma. Instead I processed it, worked through its antecedents, and fully entered adulthood. Writing had done its job. My life was in order. I boxed away my aching need for expression and exposure.

Muffling creativity and emotion, however, does not eliminate them. I continue to struggle with the tension between the creative, emotional life I crave and the comfort and solidity of being a stable, reliable person. Though this is a false dichotomy, the model of writer as a self-centered blunderer still operates in the shadows.

What happens when parts of you remain disavowed? They creep out at night. They laden your dreams with bizarre symbolism, cars that sink into waterfalls, men you once knew stalking your sleep. Traces remain in your waking hours, tingles of limbs gone fast asleep and trying to return to life. A heavy numbness weighs down your mind and traps your fingers. Weekends pass in a stupor of work and static.

I must approach this life one word at a time, one mundane, but important task at a time, one alive thought followed up by action at a time. I hold these disparate pieces of myself, the melodramatic, the calm, the wounded, the creative, the egotist, the self-sacrificer while I continue to create a whole life. A writer’s life. A mother’s life. A partner’s life. A psychotherapist’s life. To live fully, I have no choice but to create some sort of balance, to make space to write and be myself authentically.