I'm afraid of writing (part 3)
This is part of a series. If you would like to read the other parts, click below.
Today I feel so numb to existence and all the things that so many work towards, to have the items and flavors and side shows, and a few stray moments to experience it all... an experience to watch them fade. Even those things which we yearn for more deeply are here to fade, but all still work to earn them and receive that chance sometimes, and pray it stays long enough to call it long enough; or if not, complain that it should have been so much longer. None of us are ready for any death until it's too late. Items, ideas, creatures and machines, loved ones or our own precious time, none can we completely extract experience from before they leave us.
I reach for my distaste, and the all too familiar infectious grays of life lived this way
pushing me to crave.
Pleasure is not enough, because the topmost point is always in reach. Pain has a deeper bottom, and it only takes a few tastes to remember that I am still alive, and living is worth the cost exploring those pits. So ever more I crave the sting of a fiery inhale, or frigid morning frost making me feel bare, and I welcome the ache of a back that carries unseen collections. I never liked my stories, especially not telling them, so I carry an invisible tome of regrets. My possessions must be lightened today to make space for ever expanding memories of a time when I was busy forgetting that there was a future where I would have to relive everything terrible I've ever done, all while walking new paths. And each step is a reminder in aches of those choices. So, naturally, I look upon the shelves of distraction and dopamine and synthetic freedom. But I have those memories too which tell me how futile any of them would be, so now I crave pain when I feel this numb.
I’m scared to write because I’m scared it is a limited gift.
What will I be when I have nothing left to give?
What is a writer but a character to criticize and call crazy for all the things that everybody is afraid to think?
In my mind I barely like me, now others get to see and choose if they like me, too?
I am often mocked for the way I speak and I would speak more like I write if someone could listen. But none really can, and I shouldn’t expect them to. To that end I was taught how to speak, to sing the same, but some days I forget and my unique seeps out of my lips. And ironically, that’s when people truly listen, when they hear something they’ve never heard before. Maybe that's why I found writing, so I could pretend that someone was listening, or attempt to see if these thoughts were somehow new to us.
If I am to continue, I am to become everything everyone is afraid of; afraid from experience or the lack of. If I decide this is to be a continuation, it will be more garbled wisdom in the form of insanity, and possibly a lesson from emotion and what playing with that monster brings. Whether someone needs to hear it or not is for unexplainable forces to decide. What anyone does with it, is even further from my influence.
All of learning is a threat that we will become at least in little part some of it, and so I test with things unsaid wondering if possibly it could be us that becomes what’s in my head.
I'm afraid I'll lose my thirst for travel without a companion to wander with. I'm afraid I'll lose my will to write without a love or lust in sight. I'm afraid that I may never live if there comes a day when I share that final kiss. That one which makes us all the others seem empty, no longer searching that rift in time when I don't know what is thought
that after inspires rhyme.
I like to leave some mystery in expression, a release of control in logic or knowledge and believe that we don't know where rhymes come from, or ideas, or the most beautiful emotions, or how to make the best memories. But we know all those things make a more musical memory, and nothing is so permanent in minds as a rhythmic trance.
I am just one lengthy unending monologue that wishes it would end, then I could rest. The mind infects lines with rhymes and though I try, I cannot stop even if they are lies. Something sounding good is no evidence of truth, and neither is rationality. How much our feelings are our enemies I may never know in time. So it remains nice to believe that we are somehow meant to be and there are no errors, that the anomalies of my experience are actually all of reality.
After all which is better? To end the day in blissfulness or struggle through the night in terror?
So for me these things… they nag, like unfamiliar noises in the night that make shapes in our mind out of the darkness. And we wonder how dark could make shapes on top of dark with only darkness to paint with. That uncertainty drives us to feel into an empty space to validate that we aren't being tricked by perception. But part of me wishes something was there, something to explain the fear. And sounds do the same, forcing us to investigate. Once you know what a sound is, the mind allows sleep. Tormented with curiosity: is it danger or something we need to see… some adventure awaiting? Those neural circuits animate—biological memories of a time when survival was important. Today they are mere curiosities as we crave more stories: better check before you lose the chance to be more than you thought you could be.
We are one of the few creatures, possibly the only creatures that make things from ideas that we don’t need. We survived before these thoughts and often the same ones kill is, or inspire us to kill. Thinking is not survival, it is not Darwinian, it is hardly scientific.
This... this always tinkering with reality. These are the thoughts which lead to premature ends. Is logic worthy enough to have any influence on the true nature of reality. Does intellect? Does trust? Does faith? Does evidence or experience or data or evaluation hold any of it together long enough to matter to someone?
No wonder so many have hitched themselves to science. At least numbers appear constant and can be used for comparison. Subjectivity is lonely, and loosely held together by flimsy filaments of coherent rationality. Nobody warned me that an open mind is easily disturbed.
It is difficult to say if this is an externalization of a mind, or if it is the monster feeding on experiences while I work so hard to starve it.
It's all a proper mindfuck.
So today I might decide to send a final letter this way, saying that this end will last as long as we believe final is, so I could turn back to the machine which prints evidence of success in exchange for vitality. Then I could turn my efforts into a predictable outcome and participate in the idea which we pretend isn't what we are all doing here, but is precisely what we have all agreed to. Because I know I can neatly fold this ability into a nicely decorated box and leave it on a shelf for another 10 years, turn to other things that everyone will approve of and feel brief comfort that they don't have to contend with something so fanatically unpredictable. And I can pretend I like it too. I'll tuck away all the other words that were ready to be sent so I may come back and feel something by remembering that there was a time when I cared to do something for the love of doing it. And maybe those future days I'll have slivers of time before bed where I can travel through time and enjoy reminiscing and falling asleep atop my stories.
Tomorrow may be the day when I redesign
again
that's a day when I'll ignore the pain.
I'm scared to write because I’m scared to read and I’m scared to share because this is more me than almost anything I could try to be. This is less than a thing, and so I must be less than that, and my thoughts even lesser. It's not even worth placing on a piece of paper and all the hassle it would take to deliver this to you. And I know that to be true up until now, because few letters ever sent inspire someone to write one back. But let's just blame that on my bad handwriting so I don't have to feel more sad than I already do. I am so hard to find anyways, so who’s to know if a letter sent will ever be read. And a letter is not expectation, it is as final as our signatures.
Sadness knows us better than we do, and it knows precisely where to find evidence to support self destruction. It effortlessly finds those details, so that we may share the distorted nature of our experience, and find more excuse to savor depression. Emotion is that way, during sadness only able to find sad stories, during anger only reasons to be angry. It is a double edged sword: in joy more evidence to enjoy, but in wallowing there seems no way to escape without some Herculean effort during a time when there is no resolve.
I don't feel as sad as I know I could today. I feel, but remember that ability I had trained so well, long ago, to look at everything with a nod and no words, and swallow hard at the volcanic upwelling of indulgent emotion. It is not a light dismissal of what might be a relief to explode with. It is a forceful decision that says indulgence isn't worth it.
Maybe the complexity of my hidden messages is too much, enough to make someone feel inferior. But I search, for if such a person exists, one inferior to me, I'll meet them in the pit, because I already am so low and seem to still be digging.
Inferiority inspires defensiveness as we are required to cope with the possibility that someone may know more than us, and then have the ability to assert control. Everyone is manipulating reality, and all those around the manipulator are groomed for the interaction. If challenged too heavily, there are only two options: fight or run. Few choose the third: to sit. To sit is to learn, the wisdom of humanity already living among us waiting to be discovered. It is in our very being, shrouded under the defensive shells we’ve built for physical survival.
We all cower in the delusion that survival is life, when death could be much more. Just as connection is only found when we open, exposing ourselves to attack, life is only found by risking it may end in the moment we embrace it fully. And so the dance of existence keeps us enthralled. When we become silent, the opportunity to hear the music presents itself, and we can hold death in a sweet embrace as if it was coming in the next moment. In the grand scheme it is, and we are observing things in variable scope, unaware of how long anything really is.
Are actions an extension of our time or the opposite?
We don’t know until the end, and others are hardly evidence of what will bring us there. Statistics are an intellectual construct, and if the mind could save us we would make it so. Instead many are tortured by their most powerful weapon, turned on themselves, without much direction of how to escape their own hands.
Are my actions more dangerous than your thoughts?
Fear. Fear is what we shy from, and in our coy attempts to explain we minimize what it is to be ourselves, convincing anyone else that it’s better that they don’t risk this thing. What we are really afraid of are reminders that we should be taking those same risks.
Yet my best words come from a fearful place, a place of pain and disgust, after I’ve heard all the arguments of “you should.”
The constructs will work, they were built for you too.
They are said with a tall curving torso that grows above my gaze and casts a shadow from a craning back and wide eyes and a not-so-reassuring smile.
Try harder, try different, persist, it will get easier.
But it all feels like someone is trying to reassure themselves through my actions.
They must believe, deceive themselves as reflected in me, that I am a worthy sacrifice.
Maybe it works for someone, but I’ve never been a some or one.
How long is necessary for a human to torment himself inside of a "healthy" society—one that is by majority unhealthy—as we all turn a blind eye in comfortable self importance?
In my deepest discomfort comes my most poignant realization. This is a torment too, because if I am to find the highest release I would have to exert the highest level of discomfort on myself. So it becomes such an untenable balancing act, to dabble in the diseased mind just deep enough to capture some coherent truth, and exit early enough not to be consumed; then in future days to return to what was catalogued and configure it in a way that convinces enough of you to believe I'm any good at this activity. All while there is no good and bad in this sort of expression. It is just my thoughts—in some ways on some page for some day—all incomplete. As you age you carry them with you, little pockets of what I thought on a particularly difficult evening.
I’m scared to write, to show all this because it opens a portal, one for you to be with me in the mind of possibility or disease, or the disease of possibility. When we read we imagine ourselves growing in ideas we didn’t seed. My writing is an infection which I didn’t want myself and wish we didn’t need. I’m scared of writing for what it may do to you, changing how you imagine. I imagine you being freed to think while more information darkens-cloudy everything. Each “new” idea spawns a new trend, a new experimental timeline for us to test and see if others will be infected. And then we gather “allies “ on our new trend and look around thinking this is progress. But it’s not, we’re fooled again by ideas that are not our friend, our friend was just playing in an imagination.
My writing is much more than imagined words to see, it’s a sight into a picture that even I don’t see, but I feel it stronger than anything. It’s something that uses the mind instead of being used by it. Because all my life I’ve been a pawn of the mind and moved and toppled and used for winning against. For so long I’ve been training a self that I wished could fight or transcend or just ignore the mind for a bit, but all was focused on the mind, even in stillness.
It's impossible to tell if we control the mind or if it controls us. We may never know which things are bouncing around creating the inspiration for thought or if thought inspires the whole thing as a simultaneous creation of perception and action.
Yes, ye of science, go beyond and prove all of these things with your measurement machines. But in the end you may never know yourself.
That’s the consequence of observation, everything is a distraction, every data point a new idea to expand endlessly. The mind is able to focus on things outside of it through our senses. So our senses take hold as an inside job stuck in outside things and we start to feel not of ourselves. We start to feel invaded by everyone and everything else. Anyone with anything to say is enough for it to ruin our day. And focus is that thing too, a form of observation, though distraction doesn’t feel like focus. Distraction is a focus on many things, honoring more than we can see, honoring whatever there is possible to do, an opportunity for something new. That’s not our fault, and it’s not disease, it’s very human to want to see more things.
We crave expansion, we crave new ideas, we crave to be something that has never been seen before. It’s not so easy to quell these cravings. In it all fumbled incapably, we smack our friends and infect his dreams. And then we look around and wonder who are friends when anything that could be said would be assaulting our core and reconfiguring everything we wished we’d be someday. So that day never comes to our dismay and we wonder what happened to childhood wonder.
I’m scared to write because I know it might trample on your possibility. But what am I to do with it? It may be one of my greatest gifts. Though that doesn’t make it great, just better than the other things I do.
I couldn’t share all of this in speech, not in one sitting like I can like this. I can sit and allow these things to flow and plant themselves for others to know at a time when they can sit and not need to be constrained by my never ceasing brain. I water this skill in hopes it may be a mighty oak to shade travelers in search of something. For now I know how tangled and knotted this tree must be, but it can still provide some beauty that way, if just for the beauty of distorted things.
It’s not what you make, it is who is made
while we focus on things we gain better traits and lose bad ones too until we’re new and can take on bad guys or soggy shoes or troubles we didn’t know could be the things we hated being. Cause when you’re mad it’s hard to see things. As things. As feelings. As something to watch. And wonder. Woah! Are these my thoughts. Wat.. are they MINE or not anyone’s just like we can’t predict what things are to come. We can’t plan our emotions or our distress, but we can we, observing all as opportunity, while we hold hands or at least stand close
enough to feel most of what it means.
Share your feelings and your troubles, tell your friends, and don’t be subtle. Tell it more and more and hold onto less and you’ll have more real friends and less regrets.
It forces me to question all the things that don’t have answers and reveals how little I am ever to know. And how am I to be an authority on something that I know so little about. Almost nobody knows much about anything. We’re all just playing the boy who cried big bad wolf, pointing around worrying when our house may blow down and all our conception of everything falls like a house of cards that we didn’t build. And we yell and scream and ask for reassurance. But the wolf is us, and we can’t see, as we prance around calling everybody sheep.
Near is not nearly enough for us to trust in any of it.
It doesn’t make it easier to be a being when you admit you know nothing. But it isn’t about ease because when solving for ease it never ends. We’re trapped again in finding less things to satisfy needs and were never healed. Our worst pains never mend.
But anywho who needs to know, it’s not a show that we can leave, forget and just let go. This is our life and tomorrow comes and we need to work with everyone and it’s hard to work and it never ends and it’s hard work to be a friend, not pretend to blend but be real for someone else’s. For someone more is more than wealth and we want to grow everyone around that’s how we make the world go round. But even that's in question now. I think it all started when they told us what to be, right after they said you can be anything. Though it’s true you can be what you want, but do you really want to be some one, or could you be it all at once? Could you be more, even more than you want? Cause when you let go of what you want, we invite ideas bigger than elephants! Not the pink one, the one that you can’t forget, the bigger ones, that you haven’t tried, and those you haven’t seen yet.
From my current uneducated perspective it seems there are four primary reasons for writing. Utilitarian: to transfer information (maps, textbooks, news media, studies, info articles, etc.). Artistic: some compulsive expression that forms as words (poems, plays, songs, etc.). Therapeutic: to relieve the mind of an excess of computation or emotion (journals, manuscripts, etc.). Cognition: to instantiate a physical version of the mind (plans, schedules, hierarchies, etc.). To do all of them simultaneously would capture what it is to live every day. The human experience is best captured in stories—as representations of representations of ideas. But it takes unteachable mastery to distill the human experience into such limited things as words.
It feels as though our stories control our future, and the stories build ever higher as unstable skyscrapers that we never planned because the flimsy beams which we used were unpredictable things—other people and events.
So why wouldn't I choose research to build a more stable structure? At least then I could say that these are not incoherent musings of divergent random thinking that has no connection. I am somewhat kept at arms length by the saddening, maddening distrust for academia because it seems another popularity game where the most link-backed support makes you a valid source. And that just sounds so much like the earliest search algorithms—the ones that were easiest to exploit—or an even earlier construct that we still play with, where we gossip about events and then behave amidst each other as if all ever told was truth.
I’m afraid of all that too, so it may be where I’m going.
I contend that the writer does not choose his primary medium, just as a painter does not choose if she is best in watercolor or acrylic. We can train areas of deficiency, but art is not as much a game of intent as it is a calling. Without some undying urge to express these things, the artist wouldn't share at all. Embracing that is more of a relief than a disappointment, although it is disappointing that we are given certain gifts which are not most popular. And we never know which are gifts until we invest too much time in it. There is a discomfort to it all, which points us in new directions.
I may just choose them all when this is sent, when the aching for this kind of writing ends.
Lucky for me I am ever changing. The next evolution is not so obvious to me, but it is obvious that it is coming.