Trapped Within Words

A reflection on the limits and grace of language — and the quiet rebellion of writing anyway.

There are countless ways to touch the world. Some create beauty through sound, with violins, pianos, or the countless other instruments that can give emotion form. Others can pick up a pen, a pencil, a brush, and allow beauty to flow from their minds onto the canvas. 

The writer’s woe is that of our medium, words. They often feel both limitless and insufficient. 

I spend my days trying to encapsulate what I feel, how I feel, within language and phrasing. Through prose and word choice, I make myself clear, and yet it always feels as though it falls short of the intensity of emotion, the ebb and flow of the everyday. I have no song to lift the world with, only a keyboard and a way with words. I have no artistic rendering in which to aspire to, besides fellow authors. 

Being trapped within words is not a bad existence. But when music mocks me with its fluency, manipulating from my heart such complex emotions that syntax could never begin to touch, the limits of my craft are felt. The trill of a piano gently pushing one note to the next, unhurried, unpressured. I stand, listening in solemn reverence, each note washing over me, creating swells of emotion, each one basked in, each one going unnamed. 

 Even now, the paradox of clarity weighs on me as I write. The failure to communicate the depth of how the piano coaxes something deeply human from me; the ache of trying to shout how I feel from the rooftops, and yet the tongue cannot touch the true truth of how I feel, of who I am. 

I’d like to think I know who I am. The blanket of lexicons that I wrap myself with, is a blanket I knowingly chose. 

This method has limits though, the barriers of language and the true lack of truth in the words. Word choice becomes vital to being understood, and yet there are so many times, in so many places, that words cannot scratch the surface. English cannot dip its literary ladle into the barrel of grief, melting away in the heat of it. It doesn’t stand to the weight of heavy emotions. Language is limited by its cooler heads. 

Passion or clarity? These are my roads less traveled, asking me gently to make a choice. To shout the pain in my heart at the world, to make a mark so brief, to be the candle that burns twice as bright. Or, to clarify these thoughts, distance myself from the immediacy of emotionality, to record them as a tapestry of all that I am and a record for future people, faceless and genderless, to learn from my woes, excitements, and joys. 

Both paths beckon me forward, and feet move unknowingly. 

My act of writing is both rebellion and reconciliation. The quiet forgiveness of self for sins never committed, the allowance of failure, of trial.  Language continues to fall short of the point, missing the hotness of emotion, and yet we must forge forward into, marking out the edges of emotionality’s shadow. To circle the truth of the situation, of the being, rather than point at it. To name the shadow, and to build warmth from the echoes of it. 

A dear brother told me the other day, “Writing feels pointless sometimes. There’s a infinite stack of literature to be read. A person can only read seven hundred books in their lifetime. Why add to the stack?”

This question stunned me for a second. I both understood but could not reconcile the fear that built within my heart. Why add to the stack, when language can’t scratch the surface and when more educated, better writers than I have tried, and done marvelously at the task?

Yet I sit here and write, this act of rebellion being mine alone, the burden of it unshared and the effort unbothered by others. I write not to add to the stack, but to give perspective. To grow and be seen, and in turn, to see myself. 

The locus of creation is the drain I circle; the confusion of emotionality meeting the rigid structure of English and the limits of human understanding. The interpretation is my fear, the joke missed, the emotion misdescribed, or most often, not describe as fully overwhelming as it truly is. 

I often wonder if others feel the same weight, the sense of words arriving a moment too late, not carrying their share of emotional weight that was intended. Every attempt to say this and now has already missed its chance. Even as I write, I find myself editing mid-sentence, the words falling from mind to page and being rewritten immediately, the writer’s trap catching my ankle. To love words so much, that they stand between me and the world I’m trying to reach. 

The blanket keeps me separate, words assigning themselves to emotions as they flicker across, like flames in the night being snuffed by the attention. Yet striving into that, understanding that the emotion might be snuffed, but the smoke of it can still be smelled. The fingers burn from playing with it. The usage of language does not deny the feelings existence; it alters it. 

Perhaps we are all trapped within words, calling across walls that echo our own voices, desperately wanting to be understood. 

And I shall stand here and scream, shouting across this drab, echoing walls, the void beckoning at my words and my voice, creativity ebbing and flowing as my voice grows hoarse. The faint strains of piano echo around my mind, painting colors upon my room in ways language never could. 

It fills me with being, to defy the hoarseness of the voice, the burn in the fingers. The purpose of my writing is not to be understood, but to be encountered. To let someone else’s silence meet my own. To share that unspoken bond, recognized through words.