I want to write well – every sentence and every story.
Well written – not as some mythological fantasy of perfect grammar syntax – but more along the lines of producing something truly unique, words that are carefully chosen because they speak power to my experience, a series of prose un-apologetically raw and unfiltered, escaping the usual boxes that seek to repress communication, unencumbered by familiar shortcomings that so often define our participation in Life.
I want to write honestly – even if only a sentence today.
Which is why I am throwing all caution to the wind and willy-nilly posting whatever I write below…
To me, honesty is rarest when it concerns difficult situations, to those realities that intimidate and scare us, so much that we are ashamed of our fear and then live whole lives trying to evade its truth.
We hide in carefully constructed beliefs that keep us distracted and busy-minded, too tired and too guarded to really stop and pay attention to the burdens we all carry.
I want to write simply – resisting the temptation to hide my truths in long-winded sentences as some last-ditch effort to avoid this uncomfortable vulnerability.
So with aforementioned simplicity and honesty, I will share some of my feelings with you, Reader, in hopes that I can become more comfortable in communicating my humanity to the world, and in the process continue to learn how to write well.
I am free-writing this, so as little censoring as possible, and will seriously try not to edit any of it afterwards either.
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I am afraid.
I am afraid of so many things.
I fear that my writing, this blog, my writing notes, my to-read list, my endless habits of “getting ready to write”, will prevent me from accomplishing anything – that my stories will die with me, inside me.
I fear that I waste my talents by looking for the easiest paths to take, to couch myself in familiar self-loathing mediocrity, instead of daring to step out and aim higher in life.
I fear that I am as lazy as I believe I am, too selfish and weak to achieve my potential, living life as a sort of indifferent organism who spends days hiding from the world even as I judge it like some morally-superior third party.
I fear I have nothing valuable in me to share with anyone because I am too scared to face or interact with the world, choosing instead to just write about it endlessly, and to no one in particular.
I fear loneliness, especially the kind of being left behind and forgotten, where others in my life pass me by, to live life as it should be lived while I remain where I am now and feel like I have always been, surviving my few loved ones only to live on in misery like some cursed forgotten ghost.
I fear I possess no dignity in suffering or loss, and that even after so many years of life I would be as dumb and lost as anyone in the face of losing the people I depend on being there to love me.
I fear being seen for how scared I really am, to be bullied and excluded for this flaw, to be discovered as the cheat, liar and imposter that I see myself being, pretending to be cooler and wiser and more loving than I am, to show how much I am really struggling to stay afloat in this game, as though I never read the instruction manual on how to live properly, and this is all just some embarrassing fail on my part, I am fucking up at just trying to be alive.
I fear that I use my depression as a way to escape responsibility, that I am capable of so much but choose instead to be pitifully sick.
I fear my ego and pride, how I am wildly vain and insecure about my physical appearance, too scared to be seen for how I might actually look to another but even more terrified to admit this sad perspective about myself.
I fear that me trying to write, to blog, to vlog – though reasoning I could unpack my secret vanity by doing something I view as shamefully vain in many ways – is just me repeating the vices that I have carried since I as long as I could remember. I fear how I am weaker than I look, and that I won’t be able to endure any of the judgement or pity from others should they know how terribly self-centred I am every day.
I fear that my maturity has always been less about conquering demons or realizing wisdom or building skill to do what needs to be done, and more about the slow climatising of my moral compass to accept the terrible injustices of the world, opting in lowering my standards and idealism because I am tired of being wrong, of losing, of caring, of learning to enjoy the numbness towards failures of myself and the collective human species, and that in doing so I am as responsible as anyone for everything that is wrong and unfair about life.
Finally, I fear that none of this matters, that life is not fair and that there is no karmic justice for any of us, that my struggles and my successes are no more than fleeting vanity-projects of some soon-to-be-forgotten individual occupying some space and participating in the wider social ills of humanity before I too die like we all do.
I fear giving up, admitting defeat, even though I don’t know what I am fighting for, or if I even care to accept the prize, should I ever find it.
I don’t know what else to say from here, just that I sincerely doubt this is all or even most of my secrets that I keep from myself and the world.
I share this all not with any delusion that this is anything but a self-serving gesture to improve my skill as a writer.
But whatever, life is short and I doubt I will regret over-sharing than under-sharing when it comes time to face the Reaper.
Anyway thanks for reading and please comment if you like,
archie.
archie writes 