Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Free writing

I sit here in the company of myself, back in my room after a month away, and I am trying to write, anything, anything at all. A few themes have floated past my head recently: tokophobia, growing up with patriarchy, domesticity, coming back home and the sibling pact I made with my brother, but it seems like I can't go beyond the draft room. A suspicion arises: I can't write, as my flow of thoughts is blocked. And then I think that a writer's flow of thoughts is like the sewer, and as the sewage water of thoughts gushes past the drain accumulates slime and clotted rubbish and human hair and dead rats and the like, and this calls for a decluttering of the drain through posts like this: free writing, we used to call it, me and Joelyn back when we still roleplayed and occasionally one of us would hit a writer's block and the other would be super frustrated that the roleplay cannot continue with one of the key contributors ill like that. Then we wrote freely, lightly and unstoppable and uncaring of grammar and unfiltered, just letting the words out through under your fingertips like your regular detoxification at the spas. And did it help? I like to remember that it probably did, which is how we have archives of embarassing plotlines and pre-teen expressions of scenarios that will never happen.

Best thing about free writing is that you've admitted to the fact that your current piece of post is subject to your whims, and this is how you are liberated from expectations, whether real or imaginary ones set up by yourself as a consequence of a swollen ego (like I feel the need to keep my posts either on par or improve them relative to my average posts and unless my regular posts are super-duper amazing I don't know why I keep feeling this hesitation when wanting to pen down certain things as if they'll be inferior to my previous posts what the). So after that little show of humility I am free to write whatever I want, without the interference of doubts and annoying stops in the middle of a sentence phrasing.

One thing I really miss is the easy confidence I've always had about writing, like I would open up a new blog post and thirty minutes or an hour later I would have a piece of post that I am proud of to have written (but that was years ago, nowadays I look back and I cringe). I think it would be really nice to have one of those nights where you can write anything and it would sound like something that would be quoted on Tumblr and get thousands of notes despite you not being a famous person. Those nights are rare and I haven't had any this year, which is probably why I have taken to photography, although it is not the main reason, definitely not. I don't know why but I feel a little less stressed when doing photography than I would if I were doing writing, maybe because I place illogically high expectations on my writing, while I am still a newbie in photography so I can post whatever crap that I think passes for photography and pull the "I'm new at this!" card if someone says a thing. But for writing I can't do that, I've been writing a blog since I was 12, and there really is no reason for me to find this so hard. It is frightening to find that I can't articulate ideas as well as I used to be able to, but if I were to take an optimistic approach to this view, it could be that the problem lies not with my writing, but rather my ideas have grown more complex, and I haven't adapted my writing to that yet. To make things worse I write less and less and rely more heavily on visuals to get the same idea across, although of course they're both different things and they both achieve different perspectives of what I'm trying to say.

With romanticism I find that it is a lot easier to write fluidly, fingers flying across the keyboard like when you're ranting about something that makes you angry, or excited, that makes you feel. I miss that, being able to romanticize things and visualize clearly in my head the very idea I am romanticizing and then directly transfer them into words, simple as scratching an itch. But the thing about romanticism is that it presents a heavily lopsided view; it is essentially just you projecting your own ideals on a single idea, and this is why it is so easy to write about them. If you've got your head cloud high in your romanticism there shouldn't be anything unsightly to pull you back to earth, and this is where I'm experiencing my writing problem: I've got too many unsightly things pulling me down down down until I drop my metaphorical pen and give up and do something else that doesn't require failure slapping you like a wet fish so many times. In the world I live in now, the sky is too clear and the earth is too near and there are too little clouds for me to write about. This world is too pragmatic and I stop myself at every sentence and I contradict myself in my head, and I find cliches to mock, and then the whole thing quickly becomes counter-productive. It is too much simpler to take photographs, where pragmatism stops at technicalities and not doubt.

That said I think we all need a little break sometimes and this is officially my holiday writing- quite apt because I am on holiday now. And I need to start embracing my blog as a safe place for me to write again.

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