I'm afraid of writing (part 2)

Really I'm scared of everything, and this is just what I'm doing right now.

This is part of a series, if you want to read the first part click below.

---

Nowadays I find myself writing oh so much with no place to put it all, and so it continues to grow into a fat glob of useless wit and poetry, and possibly truth without research to substantiate. I could go find that evidence or spend those hours reformatting all of this into pleasant stories that the masses might swoon over or criticize, and I might have some attention to keep me from drifting off into more marginalized thoughts. But I am reminded by shrill gremlins that on the shelves of everything ever made are these same words, marketed for their time, and distributed in a convincing way to however many of us were bored and excitable for long enough to be coaxed into believing the words were worth something.

I so loathe that voice, but he is me... maybe more me than I could ever pretend to be.

Both writer and reader have to believe in that worth, to be worth our time at least, because the few dollars it takes to swoop up someone's bold investment may only be paid by future eyes. And once we were bought in, the data and the figures and the stories were all we needed to continue accepting the rest of the statements as earned credibility. And the credits would be paid somewhere, to someone, and subjective truth would be earned through the arrangement. Once believed, I could tell you most anything, and it would alter your consciousness for as long as I stayed credible. But I am no expert, nor do I aim to be, nor will I attempt to convince anyone I am worth listening to.

How much of what we are experiencing together right now is passionate storytelling under the guise of reason and truth...

or... quite possibly the opposite: truth hidden by stories?

As someone who isn't all that interested in spending time in his stories, I sure do spend a lot of time recounting my histories. And a thought passed by that this may be something closer to a diary than anything else, but it would be so strange for a diary to be talking specifically to someone other than the writer. Maybe it is all that—strange and inclusive and meandering and unrestricted—a friendsome diary, if it were.

And you, like I, must be asking… why, why like this would you say any of it?

I write because I’m afraid of it, because what comes out is the connection to what I don’t believe is true, but is something unexplained, explained in a way I trust in unspeakable ways. Speaking is too slow, and when I speak I hear myself and my self is full of experiences that hinder the possibility that I could know more. But when I write the words are forgotten, and I can prance off into the coming day as if I never felt these things. I write with no evidence because all the evidence I need is that connection, and that connection to you is what I’ve been craving for so long. I write and am so distanced, by the misinterpretation of words and lines that the thing I want most is not so perfectly made, it is one too many steps away.

If I could I would live in your mind, not to infect it, but to understand all the demons which you keep and are afraid to share with me. Because there was a day when I could not share my own, and they cackled knowing they had me and I had only them. I wanted so little more, just to sit with you and not have to think of things, to laugh and softly dream of silliness, even if the silly was of evil things. Instead I was gifted lonely screams and an evaluation of it all that comes out as me on screens. Those things could sound so evil and undesirable, but they are my little friends, and I have made peace with them for that reason—if I hadn’t they would be dancing on my grave. And knowing the exterior me would make this seem so strange, that inside this was a something which struggles to rest, and dancing shadows clash about with awkward smiles which aren't so funny or welcoming, but make you wonder how a smile could do the opposite of what a smile should do.

The me you meet isn’t that, maybe it's what I feel you need to see. Soft and sweet and overly tender while I wish to be tough and calloused from all the shadow beatings. Or fakely tough and stoic and unperturbed, but underneath quaking from the pressure. And you would wonder if you only saw one how I could possibly be the other. But I could be any of them or a combination or a seamless transition, or a total mess of them all hiding from each other. And that me you meet tramples in, searching for the you who would see it and not be so scared of me showing everything.

But you don't want that, nobody does, because if you saw the trampled one, you would know how much I hate myself. And it would explode as "I hate yous" and "change this, change that…

please be someone else."

It feels so strange trying to explain with words a thing that is so much more than words, or somewhere far from them. And the only solace is that I know you don’t need to understand, because sometimes it is just the act of participating that we get everything that we needed, though it’s often not we set out in search for.

Know it wasn’t lazy, and I didn’t just vomit out a bunch of symbols that aren’t intended to contain meaning, and it wasn’t a late night diary in the hands of quaking immaturity that brought thought here. Know that even if it appears I talk in circles, the whole thing is this way, the whole life-human-continuum thing. Everything orbits and spins and bellows headlong into each other. There are little solar systems spinning in all your molecules, and they haven’t tired knowing there is no end. They continue on, as we should too, without definitively anything besides a scant sense that it’s ok, and things being over soon means new beginnings.

Could I express anything without some catalogue of events to extract my "knowledge" from?

If only I could write as a childlike perception within the bounds of what I "know" now.

Most, if not all of my remembered life has been spent pretending. I want X so I must be Y, but inevitably I become Z: somewhere far removed from what I need to be. I am now so far from A, where I started. It is a fools errand to wish a return to that state, though I am—delusionally—lashed to a belief that the state of original cognition must be better than this. So I ponder where that original cognition hides in my psyche. He must be scared by all the wild newness that I add to his world with every new experience. Maybe that’s where me is, trying to wrangle all the identities I play as each day to have a life of exploration.

I have never gone to bed knowing how sane I would be tomorrow, or in the months to come, or if I'll still be me enough in a few years to look back and put any of this to use.

All these people have no idea how crazy it is inside of here.

And enough claim to want to know, for me to show it, but really they don't, they're just curious. And when they see they look at me and wonder what possibly could be going on. And so I shrug and continue on being the one that they knew—acting as something that isn't so scary and forlorn.

Who am I pretending to be normal for?

Inside, I’m an anxious ball of nerves fixated on the next triggered reaction. I am a surprise to myself because most of my world is internal and although I prepare with all my effort to be someone with which the outside can interface, when someone interrupts my imaginary little world, I’m a different person entirely.

I am… who is that? I don’t know if I’ve ever “felt like myself.”

For as long as I can remember I have been beyond annoyed with the things which I am defined by. But likely none of this can be avoided, and I am not in much control of the becoming. Not too long after things are defined are the reasons for definition forgotten. It only takes one generation to forget who named a city street or a town or lake or what those names meant to the ones who knew them. And it must be the same for the events and choices I made, as later I recount which names put me in which places; for what reason I will never know.

Yet we name parks and benches, stadiums and roads in the name of remembrance. All forgetting that just like we did, our children will sit and watch and play and ride on those names and never pass a care of who was there carving temporal symbols on even more temporary things.

"They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time."

How many more times that quote is said reanimates whoever said it... for now. But just one layer zoomed out, those names are illegible scribbles waiting to be washed away by things that truly matter.

What is writing if not a cataloguing of the mind as it was in that moment, a snapshot of chemical misfirings that came out as coherence?

I am too clumsy slow to catalogue the mind because I only see what it allows me to see and my fingers cannot keep up with what’s revealed. And I can’t know if revelation is a continuation of a story or a description of something new. Most often it feels as though I am just a dot connector, drawing imperfect lines to locations I can never validate as “correct.” The closest I come is finding wisdom is in cross comparison of another human who took different roads to find the same thing. I suppose I can rest, as validation, in that style of connection despite my lines being squiggled and lengthy while others appear to cut through the emptiness and find homes in the same places that took more difficulty for me. So I hold out some hope that these words are useful for, at the very least, an example of some overly complex being that lives with impossible questions. Though I hope more that you are not too plagued by your mind. But if you are—like me—I don’t suspect we’ll find answers, at least not soon, but we can enjoy the silliness for a time. And that example is hope, because something more complex than me can survive inside this body alongside all the other aspects of what we call life.

I lost my mind... again... today, and probably will again. Sometimes I'm glad that it's lost, so I can meander about not needing to believe anything. Sometimes I hope that it would last a whole day, but it never does, and the world reminds me there is much else to do than aimlessly wander without any thoughts

or possibly that there are so many that it feels like there are none because not one can be discernible from the massive voluminous clash.

Writing may be the most mis-interpretable art form, though nowadays music may be worse, as both pretend to be comprehensible by a standardized majority. But a melody holds much more meaning than a grunt or mumble smeared overtop the genius. Both writing and music are thrown about at the whims of mass idiocracy and are ever more susceptible to widely ranging definitions and colloquialisms. At least with a fun beat we can flip off the mind for a moment and pretend we know the words.

So I have to believe these words could be more than words…

Writing appears to stand by itself, separated from time, but as the calendar flips the same ideas which were prevalent during its creation are flipped with it. A picture, in comparison, will always have the same colors, lest we change those too in our experimental cultural revolutions. Artistic poignancy is always sacrificed for context as we are reminded once again: nothing human, not even our longest standing immutable creations, are immune to the sands of time.

It is a source of great irony for me to participate as a self proclaimed misunderstood entity, producing content that both works to disprove that proclamation but bolsters the idea while I do it. If nothing else it is a therapy for me. The remedy is three-fold: I am freed from the oppression of the self consuming mind-scape, I feel connected to some channeling of freedom, and I delude myself into thinking that I connect with you. Though, as always, all three may be delusion for all I know. So I continue, and hope you enjoy joining me, as I explore all my little delusions.