My Relationship to Writing

I've been thinking for a while about writing, for various reasons. The most obvious is that I've been reading some interesting books, which always has the potential for leading me off into "it must be nice to express yourself like that", which leads to "why don't I ever write anything?", which leads to "I have no idea where I would even begin", which leads to thoughts about how to avoid calcification and the realization that writing is actually one of those things the thought of which paralyzes me. Not in the way that the idea of getting over my phobia of dancing paralyzes me (I've pretty much accepted that I'll probably never address that, and the idea that I should feel obligated to address it deeply annoys me), but in a less frightening way that somehow motivates me to address the paralysis.

As a wordy, nerdy, smart introvert, I've never felt like I was an especially ineffective written communicator, aside from my weakness for bordering-on-wishy-washy nuance, parenthetical asides, and darting off onto branching trains of thought. To the extent that writing has the purpose of communicating with a specific person about a specific thing, I feel more at ease expressing myself in written form than spoken form (whether the addressee finds my written communication clearer or more compelling than my spoken communication is a whole other question). I've never been at ease with writing as artistic expression, though, and never developed my ability to write informatively beyond basic informational missives to family and friends.

My relationship with scholastic writing was always a bit conflicted, and complicated by my lifelong procrastination and difficulty choosing a course of action and sticking to it. My most vivid memories of writing assignments center on agonizing over a subject (even worse, a plot!), making a feeble start, waffling, reevaluating subject options, agonizing some more, and finally doing the actual work so shortly before it was due that the time constraint finally canceled out the paralysis and spared me from having to evaluate it (because why do that if you wouldn't have time to improve the product anyway?). I always got pretty good to very good feedback on writing assignments, but chalked that up in large part to the big-fish-small-pond effect.

Of course for years when I was younger, I sporadically kept journals--I think that's an obligation for any introspective adolescent/young adult. I still have them, and every few years I screw up my courage to peek inside one or more of them. Generally the resulting feelings are something along the lines of "bless my teenage heart, things were so hard then and I'm so glad I'll never again be that age". Rarely am I struck by my eloquence or insight, but then impressing my future self wasn't really the point.

So why my seemingly sudden and random interest in Writing More (I can't help an internal eyeroll at myself here)? Maybe I'm having a midlife crisis, though it would probably be more accurate to class it as just one more in an ongoing series of existential crises (pretty much my permanent state of being since the dawn of my awareness post-toddlerhood). I think the simplest and most fundamental motivation here is that I think it's time to exercise a weak muscle. There's also the fear of coming out on the other side of middle age having lost the elasticity of previous life stages, settling into a static conception of myself and what I do and don't do, and possibly a Holden Caulfield-esque sense of not going gentle into that good night of helmet hair, phoniness, and boredom (which I realize as I get older is a largely invalid and inflated boogeyman of a future imagined by clueless and self-righteous adolescents--but nevertheless a boogeyman holding a grain of truth).


Next subject: Since this is the first subject, let's do "my relationship to writing" through Saturday 11/24. The first person to post after this post can choose the next subject, which will start Sunday 11/25.