(no subject)
So basically I don't write anymore. Unless it has something to do with graduate school applications, I just don't write. This is really strange for me. From age 13 to 17, I religiously kept a journal-- and we're not talking entries three or four days a week. We're talking volumes and volumes of leather bound books with not a day missing. And then I threw them all away in a fit of self-hatred and the fear that if someone found them and read them he/she would realize the truth about me: that I wasn't the mature, secure, sensible, logic-driven teen I had worked so hard convince myself and everyone else that I was; that I was a failure at perfection, a fake. But then out of sheer necessity and utter confusion, I started writing again in college, pages dripping with pain and fear and love and passion and self-realization.
But lately the urge to hold a pen in my hands hasn't pulled at my insides, made me restless. I am slightly less introspective these days, but only slightly. I write less and talk more. When something is on my mind, I am much more likely to pick up the phone instead of a pen. I am much more likely to sit down with a friend than a journal. I think it's that this last year of my life has been an exercise in honesty. In college, I struggled endlessly to arrive at a place of honesty with myself which required multiple outpourings of thoughts upon a page, writing and re-writing, reading and re-reading, trying to figure out where I was lying to myself and where I was telling the truth. And now I struggle to tell the truth outwardly, to tell the truth to the people in my life, to the people that I love. I still hide sometimes. I still occassionally choose silence when it is most dangerous to me. But I'm getting better at honesty and it is changing me immeasurably.
I write less and read more. I read Adrienne Rich obsessively. She eloquently gives voice to so much more in the world and so much more inside myself than I ever could. While I struggle with multiple volumes of her poetry and prose, trying desperately to embrace the full, mature body of her work, my own writing becomes both possible and impossible. I cannot pretend to even begin to approach the poetic after I finish "Transcendental Etude" for the eighteenth time. Her talent is so far superior to mine that I want to throw away everything I've ever written. But she gives me hope for my prose. Every now and then a line from a poem will ring so utterly and deeply true that I have to pick up my pen and write a few lines expanding on it, outlining what it means to me personally and to the universe at large. But mostly, I am content to sit at her feet and absorb poetic truth in the hope that someday that truth will subtly shape my own unique prose.
I'm not really sure where this entry came from... maybe it is an attempt to justify my silence on this page for the last several weeks. Or maybe this is just my way of saying, "Hello out there! I'm still alive and here are some thoughts for your reading pleasure (or pain)."
But lately the urge to hold a pen in my hands hasn't pulled at my insides, made me restless. I am slightly less introspective these days, but only slightly. I write less and talk more. When something is on my mind, I am much more likely to pick up the phone instead of a pen. I am much more likely to sit down with a friend than a journal. I think it's that this last year of my life has been an exercise in honesty. In college, I struggled endlessly to arrive at a place of honesty with myself which required multiple outpourings of thoughts upon a page, writing and re-writing, reading and re-reading, trying to figure out where I was lying to myself and where I was telling the truth. And now I struggle to tell the truth outwardly, to tell the truth to the people in my life, to the people that I love. I still hide sometimes. I still occassionally choose silence when it is most dangerous to me. But I'm getting better at honesty and it is changing me immeasurably.
I write less and read more. I read Adrienne Rich obsessively. She eloquently gives voice to so much more in the world and so much more inside myself than I ever could. While I struggle with multiple volumes of her poetry and prose, trying desperately to embrace the full, mature body of her work, my own writing becomes both possible and impossible. I cannot pretend to even begin to approach the poetic after I finish "Transcendental Etude" for the eighteenth time. Her talent is so far superior to mine that I want to throw away everything I've ever written. But she gives me hope for my prose. Every now and then a line from a poem will ring so utterly and deeply true that I have to pick up my pen and write a few lines expanding on it, outlining what it means to me personally and to the universe at large. But mostly, I am content to sit at her feet and absorb poetic truth in the hope that someday that truth will subtly shape my own unique prose.
I'm not really sure where this entry came from... maybe it is an attempt to justify my silence on this page for the last several weeks. Or maybe this is just my way of saying, "Hello out there! I'm still alive and here are some thoughts for your reading pleasure (or pain)."