Thoughts think themselves. Words write themselves. Is this what they call free writing? Just letting your vessel do its thing? Thoughts can create feelings. Feelings can create thoughts. By that logic one can never be out of words. And maybe it’s true. Maybe we’re never out of words. Maybe it’s just the question of which words we want to share, and which we don’t. Is writer’s block real then? Or does it become real only for writers who need to get paid for their words?
I was thinking about how vulnerability on the internet doesn’t really get easier – not as much I’d expected. I went back to doing a bit of private journaling and realized I preferred it. I thought it’d have gotten easier by now. This could be another reason that I’ve been leaning towards trying to fictionalize my thoughts. Or preferring to write fiction, even though it’s tougher and slower.
Any person who’s successful in any field will tell you to do as much of the thing as you can. And yet, it’s hard to subscribe to quantity as a goal by itself. I know I need to set up more feedback loops to stay motivated. Intrinsic feedback and motivation is not sufficing, I know it’ll eventually die out. Or I at least need them for a push when I’m low on the intrinsic motivation.
I scoff at the mundane sometimes. It feels overused and weary and tiring. The green of the leaves, the blue of the waves, isn’t it all used up by now? But I know there’s a reframe there, it’s just about the arrangement and patterns. There’s just seven basic notes in the land of music too, and yet people have created beautiful things out of those.
You gotta keep practicing, that’s the only thing I can tell myself. That’s the main reason I want to keep doing this. And to remind the 5th grade me that I haven’t forgotten her. I haven’t forgotten how she wrote an essay for fun and thoroughly impressed the secondary English teacher who had no idea who she was, but was eventually happy to learn that she was one of her favorite students’ younger sister. To remind the 9th grade me who’d discovered the world of fan-fiction for the first time and was completely mind-blown for years to come. So much of who we are is where we’ve been, so sometimes I find comfort in drawing inspiration from the past.
I suppose we all like sharing stories, sharing parts of ourselves with parts of the world. Some of us like to do so with crowds and tables full of people, some of us perhaps with fewer people. Some of us from behind our screens, some of us from right in the spotlight. Engagement (that social media easily provides) is nice, I’m not going to deny that, but there’s definitely something significantly more satisfactory about writing a post of a decent length. Of course, I’m the one who gets to decide what that length is for me, so it’s all chill.
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