I've wondered

The theme of my blogs tends toward the wonderment side of things. I ask the ether questions like "What happens when...?" and "Why do people do...?" This isn't an exception.

I've been teetering on the brink of a substantial meltdown. My truer confidants have been bearing with me as I belabor the melodrama of it all. The gist is:

To a writer, the idea that the act and art of writing, and writing eloquently, is no longer an easy thing of affluence has become a challenge is more than a little disturbing.

I'm experiencing a strange kind of block. When I used to be able to envision the way I wanted an essay or a post or a short story or a poem to be, from the beginning to the end, I'm lucky now if I can string together one or two sentences before I'm taxed to the point where continuing is impossible. It's draining to write now, especially when my expectations in myself appear to have taken the whole gym rat craze to heart.

Cue the existential wondering. What is causing me to second guess myself, literally every step of the way?

At first, I wondered if it was my new, in-depth look at this medium. I've started to take my linguistics classes seriously, using what Dr. Henry and Dr. Hersker introduced me to and running with it. Now, before I can really get my emotions aligned to begin whatever piece of prose I'm hoping to crank out, my focus lands, irrevocably, on my seemingly limitless word choices. Is this the right verb tense for this particular paragraph? Will it be more clear if I adjust the placement of this adverbial? The more I dug into the subject, the more "rules" I retained. Hmm. Thinking about it like this is starting to grind my writing gears and I haven't gotten close to the point of this post. Could be something to this theory.

My other theories are less structured. The second-most prevalent (would penultimate be more impressive here? who is my audience? stop it, shawon, stop. just write. just write) definition for my source of writer's angst comes from my inability to dial things back according to the aforementioned source of emotion.

Writers are emotional creatures. We utilize common vernaculars to elicit responses in our readers by knowing how to cater to different emotional responses. If you want someone to fall in love with you, you don't write about the bubonic plague in some poorly-written limerick (unless you're seducing a sadist). If you're trying to persuade people, writing with a purely academic tone won't necessarily do the trick. Therefore, writers usually a catalyst for emotional change, or at least, a halfway decent writer can convey his or her own emotions in a sentence or two. That seems to be one of my current problems.

I lost "it." The intangible thing that comprises all of the arts, but more specifically, the thing that rings as clear as a clarion bell in a person who knows, without any doubts at all, that he or she is meant to do something because it's just part of them. I had that "it" thing, the thing that made writing as easy as breathing, the thing that I've nurtured since before high school. The thing that I had before I knew I was gay. Before I knew what the world was really like. The thing that was so enmeshed in my person that it may as well have been coded genetically, and now, somehow, it feels... incomplete. Missing.

But not really missing. Even now, as I dust out my mental cogs and put endless quarters into the "insert talent here" slot, I can feel the old vibrations of talent, but, as with all complicated patterns, I also know that sometime today, when I'm feeling vulnerable or insecure about something, the entire spectrum of my personality will flicker a few times and then go out. Poof. It's like when people ask if a scream is heard in the middle of the woods if no one's there to hear it.

I hate that expression.

Another theory, and the one that my fellow writer friends keep throwing at me, is stress. Good, old-fashioned stressors are "dimming my rainbow," as it were. Can a rainbow ever be dim, though? Can a talent ever be ripped from someone's still-beating heart like this? Any time I've experienced some kind of writer's block, I can always somehow see what it is that's holding me back. I just can't always do something about it right away. I would realize that time, and time alone, is the necessary impetus for my successful recovery, but now... now it's all just me stumbling blindly through things.

I'll read through my old blog posts from high school, from past semesters--even posts on this very website--and I'm jealous of the writer who wrote them. I don't recognize my voice anymore. One of the same friends who I feel comfortable sharing most things with tells me that she remembers the assignments she had, sometimes, but that's it. That she doesn't ever really remember writing it all. We'd laugh at that and make fun of the professors who assigned them, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm screaming at the top of my lungs, "I do remember, though, or at least I used to be able to. Now I remember nothing."

I'm rebuilding myself slowly. I'm not necessarily sitting around feeling sorry for myself. Despite the absolute terror I feel when I can't write a decent poem or a short something--or even a halfway clever facebook status--I'm still forging ahead. I'm rereading old books and I'm cilnging to those brief moments, like this one, where a ghost of my abilities swells within my typing fingertips so that I can have some vestige of myself bubbling in my neurons for later, during the inevitable crash. I'm even forcing myself to deal with my stressors head on now, instead of evading the ones that cause me the most hurt.

It all sucks. I don't know if you've ever had to rebuild a personality, but it's hard work. My close friends keep telling me that I haven't really changed much. I hope that isn't the case. Through all of this, whatever this is, I hope that, when I reach the end and I'm comfortable with myself again, I'll have changed dramatically. Or a little. Changed enough to put things like this behind me once and for all so that I can start focusing on a career. Or Hell, so I can start focusing on bringing my grades back up to meet my astronomical expectations.

Hope. There's that word again. It seems to be one of my more prominent (ultimate? paramount? stop it) themes lately. Actually, screw lately. It's always one of my themes.

Dum spiro, spero. It should be one of my themes, especially now that I've had it permanently branded on my chest. It was originally supposed to be a reminder for occasions like these, and for all of the things I've trivialized as mere "stressors" because I don't really feel like sharing them with the world. I'm still breathing, so the rest is inevitable. Inevitability is another one of my recurring themes. Fancy that.