Well…ok! Wow! This is…uncomfortable!
Okay let me take a deep breath, and try to explain this.
As I write this, I know that very few people in my life know about this little article bloggy thing I’ve spun up. I know that I’m writing for an audience of one (me), and I know that as of right now, like literally right this moment, that is enough.
And yet! And yet it is so hard to express myself here.
What a strange feeling to know beyond a doubt that you have all of the power in the world to write whatever you want in this little corner of the internet, and feel as though you have nothing to say. There should be something so freeing about shouting into the void, and yet, imagine the terror when you realize that you are not in fact surrounded by the void, but the void has actually snuck inside of you and has crept deep into your heart and has been living there for YEARS.
It’s like when you do one of those meditations from Headspace, and at the very end of the session they give you the power to think about whatever you want, complete permission to go crazy, and you find that your mind is just completely blank. Or maybe that’s just my experience.
Anyway! Another reason why this is a little uncomfortable is because I’ve found myself in this corner of the world before. Let me explain…
When I was a much younger, I used to write compulsively on a blogging site known as Xanga. I can remember spending hours pouring my thoughts into blog posts and articles about everything from my thoughts on the first Iron Man movie, to cringy posts about how sick I was of my high school friends.
Thankfully, the Xanga was lost to time (thank god), but I also feel like I’ve lost a little bit of that easy, youthful confidence in expressing myself. Maybe that’s because as you get older there are less and less people that care to hear how you’re doing. Maybe it’s because as I got older, I invested more in technical writing, and less in reflective writing. Maybe it’s an abundance of shame.
Whatever the cause is, I can remember how easy it was to fire words off the page. How carelessly I threw them there, and, reading everything back, how struck I was by my own brilliance. I feel like an older, retired gymnast who‘s looking back at their previous self, “How flexible I was back then. How strong I was, how resilient I was…”.
Even as I write this, I’m finding myself skipping around the page to new paragraphs and writing new ideas. It’s as if my brain, energized by the opportunity to express itself, is running around like some rabid kid in a candy store, firing off expletives and running into things.
What I mean to say, is that this will be uncomfortable for a bit, as I relearn the art of expressing myself. And some of my writing may not make sense for a bit, as I relearn the art of narrative. And that’s okay.
The main vision for this site is really to create a small corner of the world from which to think. And I will be fighting hard to keep this goal.
I find that in order for the muse to work, you need to take the ideas it gives you seriously. But you can’t take them too seriously that you become afraid of them. In order to confront them you have to declare them. It really is the only way.
I don’t want to have my strange little ideas bouncing around in my head any longer. I want to have the courage to create them, to define them, and put them on the page where I can look at them in the light of the day. This is no less than a battle for my own voice, for my ability to think independently.
If I’m being honest, I don’t think I’ll ever regain that youthful confidence again. But I‘ve learned how to be a stubborn and resilient motherfucker, and I’ve learned that that, with time births its own strange confidence.
Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, “People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
Here’s to fighting dragons.