I thought this post had been lost.
A few weeks later, I returned to LJ to post something inane, and it asks me if I want to restore from a previous draft. Previous draft? What had I been writing? and so I clicked. I suppose I'm a sucker for this sort of thing--a ridiculous pack-rat who hopes to find herself in the detritus of the life she's been frittering away. This is what I found:
It occurs to me that I've spent an incredible amount of energy (life?) in an attempt to avoid thinking. Over the last year I worked two jobs so that I could valiantly say that I didn't have the time, but the exhaustion that followed six- and seven-day work-weeks seeped into my very pores. Still, I let it happen, reveling in the praise I imagined I deserved for working so hard to support my little family. And when I felt like charcoal, I thought to myself that it was worth it.
I have stopped writing. This journal has been the last gasps of what was once a quiet aspiration, and it only takes a cursory glance to see that I haven't participated in the process in years. My mother, and now my father, are still convinced that I will write some Great American Novel, but there is a pervasive silence in my head. I tell myself that nothing is new, that words are meaningless, that only the lucky and the connected will publish something anyway, but I am hiding a growing fear of blank pages and pain in my hands that will not go away.
I have allowed my health to decline, although I was once over-connected to specialists and pills for every ailment.
What I had intended to post was the result of a rather random-feeling text analyzer like so:
I write like
Margaret Atwood
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
But from another selection portion of my writing, the same suggested:
I write like
David Foster Wallace
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
I'm flattered, of course, but entirely skeptical, and at the same time I am sure that I could sound like completely different authors because I have not yet found my own literary voice. I am not sure there is a voice to find, or that I am concerned with finding it.
What am I concerned with? Pointedly short-term, immediate things like moving, paying bills, finding a new second job after leaving the other. Still not thinking, but soon.
It occurs to me that I've spent an incredible amount of energy (life?) in an attempt to avoid thinking. Over the last year I worked two jobs so that I could valiantly say that I didn't have the time, but the exhaustion that followed six- and seven-day work-weeks seeped into my very pores. Still, I let it happen, reveling in the praise I imagined I deserved for working so hard to support my little family. And when I felt like charcoal, I thought to myself that it was worth it.
I have stopped writing. This journal has been the last gasps of what was once a quiet aspiration, and it only takes a cursory glance to see that I haven't participated in the process in years. My mother, and now my father, are still convinced that I will write some Great American Novel, but there is a pervasive silence in my head. I tell myself that nothing is new, that words are meaningless, that only the lucky and the connected will publish something anyway, but I am hiding a growing fear of blank pages and pain in my hands that will not go away.
I have allowed my health to decline, although I was once over-connected to specialists and pills for every ailment.
What I had intended to post was the result of a rather random-feeling text analyzer like so:
I write like
Margaret Atwood
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
But from another selection portion of my writing, the same suggested:
I write like
David Foster Wallace
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
I'm flattered, of course, but entirely skeptical, and at the same time I am sure that I could sound like completely different authors because I have not yet found my own literary voice. I am not sure there is a voice to find, or that I am concerned with finding it.
What am I concerned with? Pointedly short-term, immediate things like moving, paying bills, finding a new second job after leaving the other. Still not thinking, but soon.