OVERWRITERS ANONYMOUS

I have a confession to make:  In addition to being a word-aholic, I am an over-writer.  I write until I am so full of the words I craved in the hours before the feast that I cannot consider one syllable more without feeling decadent or risking serious intellectual heartburn.

So, I push myself away from the computer feeling a slight tightness in my head and a mild sense of bloating in my thoughts.

I worry that I probably wrote too much, that I've gained too much mental weight tasting all those rich vowels and salty consonants and wished I had exercised a little more restraint and avoided indulging in that one last sentence; however reduced in content I fooled myself into believing it was.

And then comes the inevitable and I say to myself:

"This is it.  I'm expanding inside like the universe and can't get my thoughts down fast enough to burn off the excess ideas.  I don't want to lie awake again tonight with literary indigestion; ruminating over that verbal concoction I devoured with such heady passion then tossing and turning against the burn of what was left unsaid.  I'm getting fat with ambition and if I go on like this, I'll be as big as a thesaurus in six months.  The expanded edition."

Yet by dawn, I am starving again.

And on it goes.  Day after day after day.

It is getting to the point that I think of little else.

I watch the chocolate sky before a deep summer storm and see poetry.

I listen to the velvety chatter at a party and hear the smooth blend of phonics usher in the delectable topic sentence for another blog.

I hear the buttery curl of words as they unravel in a foreign tongue and despair that I don't understand this extrinsic food.

I digest juicy, real-life stories and ponder name changes and clever obfuscations to broil a safe tale where no one gets burned.

I know I should enroll in Word Watchers, but isn't that what I am already doing?  How could watching them more make me crave them any less?

So, here I sit.  Plump with ripe options for this fruitless indulgence never minding that I often have to feed alone.

Not caring that fewer and fewer are able to stomach my distracted company and tend to recoil from the excessive girth of my ample vocabulary.  The one that I deliberately amassed one word at a time over many years through my gluttonous frenzy.

Lately, I have forced myself to consider cutting down on my intake of thoughts and the subsequent word-laden repasts that I share with such abandon.

No one else should feel obligated to ingest this much confessional food just to please the hostess, and I don't want any psycho-intestinal flare ups to occur in anyone after leaving my prolific table.

Which is why I am considering a fast.

Perhaps indulging only in soup.

As long as it's not Alphabet Soup, I think I'll be fine.