The longer I wait to write, the angrier I become with myself. This setup seems so foreign to me – How do I write? Was I ever able to do this? I’m annoyed that I even let myself get to this place where I’ve lost all momentum and motivation and discipline to write and I have to spend more time re-teaching my mind what my body has never forgotten how to do. My fingers don’t seem to fumble on a keyboard, yet I find myself hitting the backspace button repeatedly because my brain is a mess and can’t quite decide how it wants to express itself. It feels as though I've been stuck replaying the same level of a game over and over again. There's always something that prevents me from progressing and keeping me at square 1. I have insufficient experience, I haven't found a collectible needed to progress, there are enemies that lie in wait who remain undefeated.
I haven’t published on this website in months (I mean, the proof is in the archive). It has been ages since I’ve written anything more than a paragraph or two that wasn’t work-related. I remember when I purchased the domain to my website, I promised myself that I would post every Sunday or least dedicate some time to write on a Sunday. I’ve always found it unbelievably easy to break the promises I make to myself which is frustrating and strange considering how I bend over backwards to appease other people and uphold promises made to them that even they are unaware of. I suppose it makes some kind of sense. It’s easier to please other people than to please myself - I’m far less easily impressed. I make other people a priority so that I have an excuse not to focus on myself and my personal aspirations. Why? I don’t know, out of fear maybe? Maybe what I’m so scared of is going full force into taking my goals seriously and then failing. It’s been ingrained into me not to be selfish or self-serving to the point where my own failure would be processed as a warning that I had been focusing too much on myself. There’s a part of me that is so terrified at failing that it doesn’t even want to try. Of course, not trying is worse than failure because I haven’t grown from doing nothing – I just get more comfortable with the idea of being safe in nothingness. However, I can’t keep claiming to be a writer if I never write.
I need to be writing more with the purpose of publishing my writing. Otherwise, I’ll be waking up on the other side of five years abroad with nothing to show for it in regard to my writing goals. Writing is one of the few things that make me feel alive within every cell and semblance of my being. The problem comes with how I’ve used writing throughout my life as a healing activity. I learned that I was good at writing when I started writing about pain, more specifically when I wrote in a way that channelled my own pain. There has been so much therapeutic value that I’ve found in my writing, but that came at a price. I have conditioned myself to associate writing with pain and the processing of difficult emotions. I always end up writing about pain in some way, I end up caught up in the same cycle I’ve been in since high school. Even now, I’m writing about the pain of writing about pain. Hopefully the difference is that I’ll be able deconstruct and dismantle the cycle... because I’m so tired of writing about pain and sadness and heartbreak. I’m not saying I never want to write about those things again, I just don’t want that to be all that I am capable of writing. I want to be able to do more.
I need to be writing more with the purpose of publishing my writing. Otherwise, I’ll be waking up on the other side of five years abroad with nothing to show for it in regard to my writing goals. Writing is one of the few things that make me feel alive within every cell and semblance of my being. The problem comes with how I’ve used writing throughout my life as a healing activity. I learned that I was good at writing when I started writing about pain, more specifically when I wrote in a way that channelled my own pain. There has been so much therapeutic value that I’ve found in my writing, but that came at a price. I have conditioned myself to associate writing with pain and the processing of difficult emotions. I always end up writing about pain in some way, I end up caught up in the same cycle I’ve been in since high school. Even now, I’m writing about the pain of writing about pain. Hopefully the difference is that I’ll be able deconstruct and dismantle the cycle... because I’m so tired of writing about pain and sadness and heartbreak. I’m not saying I never want to write about those things again, I just don’t want that to be all that I am capable of writing. I want to be able to do more.
I remember being so terrified in high school to write about anything other than death because that’s all that I had written about convincingly. As much as my writing healed me, it kept me in a place where I was feeding into my own depression in order to have something to be sad about... in order to write again. University was similar, although more deeply connected to themes of unrequited love and heartbreak. Just a different kind of sadness. I found almost every excuse to punish myself. I wasn’t good enough for these people and that’s why could never return my affections. I was never good enough to be loved. Therefore, I needed to be punished. And then I could write. Sexual identity and orientation became promising themes for me as I struggled to come to terms with things that I had learned about who I was and the parts of myself that I had been hiding. While I speak more convincingly on those themes due to greater experience and confidence, I struggle to write about them because they are so wildly entangled with my history of self-harm and self-loathing that it would mean more writing about pain and suffering and inner turmoil.
Writing became cemented as strictly for healing and processing purposes. I never gave myself the room or allowance to grow as a writer beyond that. If I wasn’t in some kind of pain, I convinced myself that there was nothing to write about that I had the ability to convey - that only happy people could write happy things, and I was not happy. Any sort of published writing of mine has been decidedly depressing or at least recalls depressing times and experiences. So much time has passed since some of these moments on which my mind dwells. I gave myself an unnecessarily long grace period when I moved abroad, and even once I started taking my writing ambitions more seriously, I let myself make excuses and put other things ahead of them.
Now, I wish writing wasn’t so immediately triggering and traumatizing. It saddens me that the one thing that brings me such instant relief, release and joy has been imbued with the pain of my past. Every time I sit down to write, I’m inevitably sitting down to cry. I very rarely make it through writing something without crying. Most times I’ve just stopped. Issues I didn’t even know were issues bubble up from my subconscious and make their way into my train of thought. The pieces I have tried to work on often become derailed and lack their intended focus and depth, and I am usually left trying to stuff unwanted memories back into storage. I’ve processed my pain and past. My most eloquent style of writing, however, asks of me to dwell on old issues as if there’s something more to be said about them. The truth is that there isn’t anything for me to say – at least not in my writing, not anymore. It’s taking so much longer than I expected to learn how to take the heaviness out of my writing.
Does that make any sense?
Does that make any sense?
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