This famous writing teacher I once had told me that if she didn’t write, she’d probably die. I used to think that was true for me, too. But here I am, not writing and not dying. I am in the middle. If I don’t write, I will suffer. But if I write too much, I go crazy thinking about what writing means: why I’m doing it; why it’s important; why it doesn’t mean a damn thing to anybody but me; why when I stopped writing I didn’t die; why I moved on; why my world opened from its blank page and spilled onto the infinite sphere; why I still don’t really know how to look at the world any other way but as something meant to be flattened out onto a screen, somehow, mediocre as it might be, made into my own even though I don’t even feel like I own my own words anymore Everyone’s got the same style, everyone’s thinkin the same thoughts, if they’re thinking them. What is it I put down and can’t stop taking back up? What is it about the mind that it has to keep thinking, wouldn’t stop even if it could but it can’t. Like a goddamn whirling dervish, sometimes thoughts are something let out of hell and it spins and spins. Can’t make your mind stop but can’t do anything with it either, just throw yourself into work and calm the devil inside.
I wonder if I’ll start to write again one day, write real things instead of just taming that wild thing with powell palliatives.
