Here I am again, staring at a blank screen, hoping something inside me can flare up with inspiration long enough to capture my muddled thoughts into words.
Though, already, the page isn’t quite so blank, is it? There’re words there now. And look, more. Huh, maybe this isn’t so hard. Ok, let’s try talking about feelings now, surely that’s harder.
I feel like throwing up and punching a hole through a wall and ragdolling down a flight of stairs and driving my automobile down roads until nothing looks familiar and snapping all my electronics in half and laying on the carpet for a whole day and carrying furniture into a new house and doing pushups for an hour and riding a train for the first time and yelling at my stupid thermostat and squeezing lightbulbs until they break and diving into a pond and telling everyone I’ve ever had a crush on how much they made me feel inside and skipping rocks across a smooth lake and paragliding you ever seen someone paraglide it looks EPIC.
Hmm not much harder that, but none of it made sense, did it? So somewhere along the line here we need to translate more effectively, the feelings behind the words. Let’s try a more titrated compromise then, shall we?
= = =
These past few years have been extraordinarily strange for me. Global circumstances obviously feed a part of it, but it goes beyond that; my day-to-day has become something of a fever dream. I wake up at odd hours, rush to be present at my desk for work, then realize nothing has changed in 14 hours, then proceed to find random little ways of dousing my gremlin brain with enough serotonin to keep myself lucid for the next 8 hours. Somewhere in there I either throw together a microwave lunch or spend obscene amounts of money on food delivery from places I could easily drive to myself but choose to avoid for no conceivable reason, other than convenience. More anxiety and/or stress from meetings leaving me drained after that. Then I sign off the work laptop, walk around for mere moments in a weak attempt to keep my heart pumping, then fire up a video game to stare at or maybe pick up the odd book I have strewn around my apartment. Do that until someone texts me and breaks my tunnel vision or I fall asleep. Then the cycle begins again.
All the while I have somehow maintained a deep, innate desire to travel; to see the world and experience new things. Exciting adventure calls me, and I daydream often between my early morning panic-brewed coffee and the barely conscious, brain dead after-work entertainment. I imagine what the air smells like in other countries, what hearing no English words in a crowd of strangers would sound like, or what exotic animals would look like in their natural habitat.
Oh, and get this- I still call myself a writer. That intrinsic need to feel competent in a niche craft is inescapable for me it seems. But I couldn’t even spell ‘competent’ up there without spellcheck screaming at me. So yeah, it’s going really well if you couldn’t tell.
After all that, I suppose I should take pause and assure you, the dashing and gosh-darn attractive reader, that I am indeed still a sane, witty individual. No cause for alarm, you see I am a writer; we make up everything and just hope it’s enough to convey the emotion we felt while our little fingertips hammer away at these keys. So sometimes we get a little too carried away, like in the first half up there where the run-on sentence about stairs, trains, and automobiles probably made you rethink clicking on this post. By the way, hi, if you’re still reading.
= = =
That was a little better, don’t you think? As far as works of art go, it won’t get published anywhere or make it into the cited sources for any college papers any time soon. But hey, it got me to sit down and think about my feelings, right? So maybe that’s enough.
And maybe the chaos of this post is something you can relate to. This… strange change of pace so many of us were forced into hasn’t quite yet been shaken off or reverted by everyone. So sometimes it takes a look inside – a sit-down with a dusty keyboard even – to realize things are funny. But not funny-haha: funny-I’m-gonna-have-a-breakdown. We all have to start paying attention to the things we’ve let ourselves do, the habits we’ve been forming, and the people we’ve changed into.
I’d encourage you to evaluate as well: Are you happy with where you are? Or at least, does it bother you, the person you’ve started to become? Any cycles you need to break? Any people you need to reach out to, see if they’re still interested in being in your life? Or apologies you should make, after isolating for so long? We’re all human. It may be time to remember that and start living for the future again, rather than the next serotonin-laced step of the routine.
UWC 