Chelsea Borg: (’19): The Apex Predator
Writing is like population control for my thoughts. Necessary for the health of the environment. My worries and obsessions are an invasive species in the delicate ecosystem of my sanity…” With no natural predator, they’re free to procreate wildly. They graze and gorge themselves on the fragile flora that is native to my mind, the little bursts and blooms of creativity, empathy, motivation. I pin these thoughts to paper to before they consume the entire food chain. Their numbers briefly diminished, my worries are banished again to the shadows of my mind.
What happens to a worry left untamed? Most times, I’ll find myself ruminating- taking an anxious thought and following it in a downward spiral, making one worry lead to another to another to another until I loop back to the first thing I was worrying about and begin the ritual again. Chewing over the same thought on a feedback loop. Why did I say that? Why did I say that?
When I write, the words have already been spinning around in my head for a good three or four rotations. The act of writing, for me, is not the creation of the thought, but the opportunity to finally put it to rest. To control it. The sentence I’m writing at this moment has been fully formed in my head for the last three lines, and now, as I type, I’m free of it. It’s become just a cluster of black pixels against the bright white of my computer screen. When I can see something, when it becomes a physical object, I’m no longer being tasked to remember (and remember and remember over and over). Now untangled and displayed plainly, I can appreciate how harmless the simple sentence is. Appealing, even. What was once a predator is now a seed of an idea, planted for future exploration. The written rumination is safe and well preserved enough that I feel ready to face the next invasion.