A heavy heart is a difficult thing to express. To take an infinite, unbearable weight and fit it into a sanely formed sentence that must end with a period... just seems like madness. Especially when you know the pain will undoubtedly go beyond the period. For most of us, it’s hard to find that pause. To bring the rambling inside us to a final point and take a breath.
Perhaps that's why so many of us seem to have slipped into madness. It’s not that we’re crazy, we’ve just been hurting for so long with no one listening that we’ve forgotten where to put the period. Where to stop, collect ourselves and start another sentence. So we ramble on, day after day until our entire life becomes a giant run-on sentence that no one cares to hear or understand.
I was always told to write down what’s eating at me, to let out what’s brewing inside before it brews me up along with it. That’s probably where my very first song came from. For years I’ve done just that. Poured my heart out on paper, analyzing it, reading it back, trying to understand myself in reference to my struggles. I always thought it was about expelling the pain, getting it out of me and onto the paper. But I’ve come to find it’s really about just learning where to put the period.
Your life will always be a story of struggle. It will appear on every single page of you from beginning to end. There’s no erasing it, no hiding it, no ripping it out. All you can do is learn where to put the period. Where to pause, breathe and form a new sentence. And in that process you learn the most valuable skill you could ever obtain… how become an Author. Of both your story and how it’s remembered.
You may not be able to change what life spills on your pages today, but for the best of you, just learn where to put the period. Because in the end, the only thing that separates the greatest of madmen from the greatest of authors is a simple dot between their ramblings. A tiny pause in their madness. Just enough to catch their breath and keep their story worth reading.
