To Gain Your Own Voice, Forget About Having It Heard

I’ve become obsessed with writing, like it’s a practice I can’t disconnect from. The last post took several days to write, I started it and then kept revisiting and revising it. There were multiple directions that it could have gone in and I disliked all of them. I would start paragraphs, come up with sentences I wanted to use, and then everything would immediately fall flat. At one point I even decided to scrap the entire entry. A trip to the supplement store to pick up fish oil helped me clear my mind, and I finally finished it on the train back to Brooklyn.

I’m a bit terrified of writing at this point. The blog was fun in the beginning because my relationship with it was fairly blasé. I was smoking weed and dealing with an emotional crisis so I had an excuse to show up half functional and mostly apathetic. Writing then was like getting tipsy on a first date, it was a fun little experiment, nothing serious.

Now I feel like I’m in a long term relationship with writing, and the reality keeps fluctuating. Before I was showing up with my emotional crisis, so it was easier to access a torrent of emotions. That chaos has subsided though and now I’m left with a dilemma: how do I adequately express myself? How do I take my my psychological reality at any given moment, distill it, and then serve it in an entry?

The reason this crisis is coming to a head is because I’ve started looking at my writing from a more critical lens. Sometimes I feel like talking about my problems, or whatever it is that I’m dealing with, is the equivalent of microwaving a tv dinner. It’s easy and it doesn’t pack much of a nutritional punch. I would like my writing to feel a bit more exotic, something that can temporarily suspend someone from their current reality by creating a pathway to something deeper, more meaningful.

I’m realizing this is a much more extensive undertaking than I anticipated. New York is incredibly humid right now. I was at the park late Wednesday night and it was flooded with people. Summer brings out everyone’s playfulness and it was on full display while I was there. I tried coming up with ways to describe the scene and nothing really captured how I felt. I realized I need to learn how to write. It’s easy to throw words on a page, but it’s an entirely different undertaking to carve my reality into someone’s mind so they can taste something different.

Title is an Allen Ginsberg quote