I suppose you have to start somewhere. That’s probably the hardest part - that’s what I try to tell myself when I’m reluctant to write.
“It’s alright Self. You haven’t actually produced anything substantial since you graduated a year and half ago, but you can write. The story is there, waiting to spill out like of you like beer from a tap. You just gotta pour. Pour baby pour!”
But I’m reluctant to write. The blank screen stares back at me, taunting. The cursor calls me a bitch. I hate that fucking white screen.
Sometimes I claim to be a writer, very rarely to others, but sometimes I try to pawn the idea off on myself, sneak it under the rug of self-definition.
But I’m not.
What defines a writer exactly? It’s not being published, being recognized, or even being good – it’s actually writing. Just do it. (Sorry for the infringement Nike) Just produce, sit your ass down and type. And I don’t.
Whenever I’m not sitting in front of a keyboard, letting the thoughts that swirl upstairs regurgitate through my fingers onto a screen, I always have some excuse. I’m taking notes, planning the next (first) big thing. It’s all bullshit.
---A quick interjection here. I’m in front of a computer screen all day at work. Check that, two screens – filled with a flickering plethora of spreadsheets, databases, quotes, e-mail addresses. I hate my goddamned job. ---
The hard thing about writing – actually writing – might be the vulnerability of it all. Once a word is down, read by another, or even by one of my own many personalities, it is absolute. The harsh finality of acknowledging your own thoughts, really contemplating them rather than letting them sit in the background, is daunting. They become real, tangible manifestations of your own dysfunctionality.
I wouldn’t say I’m certifiably insane - perhaps borderline, but not off the deep-end-shit-my-pants-fucking nuts. I call it eccentricity. Keep your semantics off my psychology.
One of my self-concluded redeeming qualities is my adamant claim to “Not care what others think of me.” It’s a mantra, a verbal talisman to rid the incessant premonitions of mediocrity that haunt my peripheral. But regardless of what I say, everyone cares a little bit about the thoughts of others. How do I rate? What do they actually think of me? Any relatively self-aware individual has to accept that; it is all part of the social code, the unspoken Charter man accepted when he entered society. I’m okay with that.
The important thing is to what degree you let that worry of outside opinion influence your individual actions. Actions define the person to an extent. That’s another mantra I suppose – a rarely uttered one but the lesson is routinely prevalent in my unconscious curriculum.
If you fail to act because it is against the social norm, because it is unpopular, because others may think you are a fucking weirdo, then you’re allowing outside opinion to affect you and therefore, your life. I’m not saying out-rightly that that’s a bad thing. I’m merely acknowledging the fact that an overriding worry of other’s opinions has a drastic, yet often unobserved and unmentioned effect on our daily lives.
How much do you care?
I’d like to think that I don’t worry too much about how others perceive me. In the end, it’s uncontrollable therefore irrelevant to my personal agency. Yet, there are many things that I don’t say or do.
I have brief, tangential scenes that play in my head in any given social situation where I do the exact opposite of the expected, socially accepted behavior. If I’m talking to an old woman, I smack her. If someone is showing me something expensive, I break it. If I see someone with a rat-tail, I cut it off. Each of these actions are as easy and as possible as anything – yet I don’t do it for fear of reprisal, along with the knowledge that it’s the wrong thing to do morally – save for the rat-tail thing.
Writing offers that rare freedom to do or say whatever you feel like. Fuck the norms, fuck limitations.
So here I am, unsure of what exactly I want to write except that I know I have something to say. I am alive. And I am very, very aware.
I realize I’m a lazy ant living in a giant’s world. I’m okay with that for a variety of reasons but two quickly come to mind:
-I am surrounded by other ants, equally inconsequential yet striking in potential. We’re all schmucks.
-It is a beautiful world.
**Listening to Warren Zevon's The Wind album.**
