I write the type of prose and poetry that I do for one reason only, and that is to allow the darkness in my mind an escape.
Now as to why I choose to write particularly vampiric or gothic prose/poetry is solely based on the darkness of the thoughts that wish to be expressed. When I think about how the long illness affected me mentally, I felt very much like a vampire (an no, not the adorable Twilight kind). Everything that I enjoyed about life was taken from me. The illness took away my ability to think freely. All the joy and happiness I felt before was replaced by a nasty hallucinogenic voice of extreme hatred and isolation. My ability to eat was taken away as well. Every food I enjoyed caused rupturing, swelling, and intense pain, and soon I was on a diet of only green juice, salad with no dressing, nuts and seeds, nut milks, and water. I could have no meat, no bread, no sugar, no rice, no beans, no fruit. I started to waste away physically which only furthered the mental problem. I identified with the idea of the vampire by the torture of eating to live, no longer living to eat, and by the intense longing for the life that I once had that I was afraid I would never be able to live again. I saw the world differently and struggled to make sense of the visual flashes of light and the voices in my head that tortured me.
So I began to write them down.
I have logs of work of poetry and prose that will most likely never be shared publicly because they are directly linked to my own personal torture. What I write now is the product of healing from that torture. Of knowing that all the auditory and visual hallucinations are gone (thank you medical intervention), but that there is still pain that my mind wishes to work through. I write of horror juxtaposed against beauty. Of hopelessness against hope. Of the struggle to live and the outcome that I did because I believed that I was strong enough to survive even if things never got better. My writing of this type of work proves to me over and over again that I am fully better, that my mind is now completely once again mine after a long hard battle won. I imagine this is what it would be like for a vampire, you go through torture in the beginning, but if you are strong enough to continue living after death, you have won the battle over the darkest part of your life. You see life differently, and seek to express that difference somehow to other people.
So when I sit down to write my poetry, I usually do so for at least half and hour chunks. I think to myself "What needs to be expressed? Why am I compelled to write right now?"
I will give an example of a manifestation of a work right now.
First I acknowledge that I am feeling tired, my eyes are heavy from not sleeping well. There's a slight pressure in my forehead and my heart is beating altogether too heavily. But my mind is completely silent in this moment.
I take the feelings and acknowledgments of those feelings above and turn them into written words.
My eyes are heavy. My heart thundering in my chest. There is a silence in my mind that compels me into darkness.
The prose above describes my awareness of my body's actions and feelings, but at the core of it is the apprehension of "is my mind truly quiet now?" And the answer to that is "yes". For others one might see this as simply falling asleep or going into the void of one's mind. They mind see it as a disturbing thought arising. I find all of those things beautiful, as while this piece was written based off of my own personal bodily experience, it can lead others into their own.
I hope that I was able to explain the process of how I go about writing my prose and the inspiration behind it that you see on Twitter and that it helps fellow writers who wish to explore the process of this style do so in their own way. I know it has helped me immensely be able to process what is going on and did go on in my mind, and maybe it will help someone else as well.
It is my goal over time to have enough of this poetry/prose that I can categorize it and publish a work from it. I think I have over two hundred of them right now, but they exist in diaries and on pages of paper that are stuffed into notebooks, and others on my phone. I need to organize them, and by that time I figure when it is done, I will be fully healed.
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