I’m literally sick, with a cough and a flu of some sort. It’s kind of odd that after 20++ years I still completely haven’t figured out what different kinds of sick are, and how I ought to deal with each piece of sick. All I know is that they incapacitate me in different ways, to different degrees, and that I’m generally bad at dealing with incapacitation.
So I’m sick, tired and weary and I feel like I haven’t really done anything good in a while. I suppose that might be another way of saying that I feel like I haven’t written in a while. I talked about this in my previous vomit when I was parroting Ray Bradbury– it seems like I’m lighter and happier when I’ve been writing. If I haven’t been writing, my whole being starts to get edgy… I start to feel like I’m getting “dirty”, even. Muddied up, unclear. I start wanting to pick fights, to argue with people. Which I know is kinda… selfish? It’s kind of jealous? It’s what happens when I feel like my world-view hasn’t been represented, validated.
Which is really narrow-minded, I guess. But it remains true that I feel pain and frustration, and it remains true that writing seems to alleviate that pain. I know that I want to become a better writer, and I know that practicing writing– whatever the hell it is I might be writing about– makes me a better writer.
Ergo, I need to revisit the simple idea that writing is therapy.
I think I make a mistake where I try too hard to plan my writing. I used to try to come up with grand ideas… these days I try to come up with plans and schedules, and in both cases I think I’m a little bit right, but also quite a bit wrong. (Right and wrong in the sense of– how should I approach this process? What is the best way to do it?)
Heh, feels like I’m not grammar-ing properlly. I’ll let that slide. That was an early principle of these vomits– the grammar is less important than me getting out what I feel like I want to say. And Bradbury pointed out that there is truth in quickness– when you go fast, you don’t have time to think so you say what is really there, even if you say it in a way that’s less than perfect. You can edit later.
Right, the right way of doing it. Writing should be a joy. It should be something that I’m excited about. The words should fly off my fingers. If they’re not flying, maybe I need to read a book, trigger some thoughts. Maybe I need to go for a run. But I have to stop pretending that I can store inspiration for later use. Inspiration, it seems, almost always needs to be acted on immediately or given up. And I try to hold on to it for far too long, and it wears me out. It’s like running after a runaway horse, hoping to climb upon it and domesticate it. If the horse is already past you, there’s no way in hell you’re going to catch up on foot! You should wait for the next horse. And as far as we can tell, we’re in a bloody stampede of sorts– there’s never going to be a shortage of horses! I just get fixated on the horse ahead of me and I get so upset when it seems like I’m going to lose it.
So this is me giving myself permission to lose horses. Life is too short and fleeting for me to obsess about horses that get away. If I just focus on the fundamentals, pay attention to the nuances of a given moment, I should be able to capture whatever it is that is coming at me.
Which isn’t to say that I’m going to discard all of my plans altogether. I still think it makes sense for me to work on old things and to find connections between things. What I should do instead I think is… I should have a ritual/routine where I get out my computer to write. I think I’ll walk into my study and go and write there. I think I’ll have a box which says “list of old ideas and thoughts about what to write”, which I DONT NECESSARILY HAVE TO OPEN. I think that’s the key. I think too often I feel like all my old ideas are a sort of obligation– just becuse I didn’t do my homework as a kid, I have to now do justice to each and every single piece of idea I’ve ever had. Just to close the loop on all of those things. I think I should be more okay with literally burning things. Burn it all to hell. Start over. I have to have faith in that process.
What am I writing for, though? I’ve been feeling a tinge of nihilism lately– that there’s no point to any of this, that we’re all going to die, and the universe is itself going to die, and it wil be all for naught, bla bla bla. I started listening to some Alan Watts and reading some Eckhart Toille looking for some sort of inspiration of salvation. I know that the sort of existential despair is ultimately BORING, which is why I’m confident that I won’t linger in it for too long. Life is a gift and an opportunity, even if it isn’t necessarily part of some ultimate meaning or anything like that.
I suppose it’s more interesting to think about why I think what I think, why I worry about what I worry. A lot of it seems to be some sort of defense mechanism. I’m reaching the end of 1000 words in this one pretty soon, and I’m going to do a thing where I try to wrap this up and then start my next thought in another vomit. Because it feels like that will do me good.