I’ve been sitting around my apartment all day, since I woke up at 9:22AM, avoiding the very thing I am doing right now, writing.
Desperate for distractions I’ve made two cups of coffee with my new aeropress and grinder (which were delicious by the way). I’ve spent hours needlessly scrolling over pages of the internet that I don’t care to read. I unsubscribed from a bunch of emails then did some laundry. I signed up for a surf lesson at West Edmonton Mall, made soup (well, I warmed up a can of soup), and picked up then put down my ukulele, repeatedly.
I’m listless and I’m restless. And realistically, for me, exactly what I should be doing is writing. It helps.
I spend a lot of my day with thoughts of what I could write rolling around my head, so, its not for a lack of ideas. My problem right now is I believe that whenever I write, I should write as honestly as possible. Honesty in writing, and more generally in life, is where true connections form and that’s, I think, what we’re all after. Or at least, that’s what I’m after, a true, human connection. For you to say, if nothing else, you put it out there and I felt it.
The problem is, honest writing is scary. It’s scary and it feels self indulgent. It’s scariest to write when you have something gnawing away at you, because who knows what will come out of my mind and plop its ugly self on the table, forcing everyone to acknowledge its presence. And then its this real piece of raw nerve I’ve exposed to anyone who cares to read it. They could easily look at it and tell me horrible things, like its stupid or I’m stupid or any variation of accusations using the word stupid.
Or, what if someone calls me neurotic? And would they be wrong? I do think a lot, so maybe I obsess a lot? Would. they. be. wrong?! See, a quick fear spiral starts and I figure its best if I just continue to watch season 2 of The Wire (yes, I’m only just watching it now) instead of working on cracking open my chest for all you to see the oozy bits that make me tick.
The next fear is that whatever I write here is self-indulgent. It often feels this way, as if I’m trying to call attention to myself and have you all applaud me or sympathize with me, and maybe that is selfish or something? Its odd, even as I write this I think how much that concern is faulty. This is how we connect with others in life, by sharing our story and being open to hearing others’.
But then there are always people who are constantly telling you their problems, like nothing is ever going right, and no matter what happens the thing that goes wrong integrally affects them. As in they tell you a story about how something happened to their friend but the whole thing is about how awful it was for them, not for their friend. Then they’ll probably tell you that if their friend had just followed their simple, but obviously correct instructions, everything could have been avoided and life would be perfect… Sorry, I’m on a tangent.
There is fear that I come off preachy because I have opinions, or weak because I have emotions, or crazy because I have fears ,or whatever else; there’s a million reasons that I get scared to write then paralyzed and just stop. But that’s life really.
We all want to look normal, and happy, and content. Now, I don’t know if normal, happy, content people exist but I tend to think that people who say they are, are liars. This might say more about me than it does about their actual level of happiness, but I know that the world throws a million things our way and we’ve been sold this notion that an idealistic realm of happiness exists if we can just get there. This lie (at least I can’t imagine its a truth) keeps us feeling like we’re never enough or never quite there or all our friends are hanging out without us, or whatever else.
But just like in life, or writing, or whichever you put first if you can break down a wall and talk to a person, really talk to them you start to see that our neurosis are pretty normal and we all worry.
So if we’re all dealing with these things, which trust me we are, why is it so shameful to admit it? Sometimes we get sad, sometimes we get lonely, and sometimes we wonder who we are and what we’re doing on this globe. These are human things and we shouldn’t have to hide it or fear it or excuse it. We should be like ‘yo, I’m sad’ and the person sitting across from us can just be like ‘that is not a problem, that is a state of being.’ When we feel like these things are wrong, they are so much more difficult to deal with.
Let’s not back down when fear tells us that we’re insanely different and more complicated than everyone else on the planet.
Fear is an idiot.
She Rambles 