To sleep, perchance to dream

Do you sit down and write the story of your life in pencil? Or in ink? I guess there’s some psychological ramifications to your choice. It seems like one of those personality gauging questions that you’re asked in 10th grade by your guidance counselor. Trying to figure out “who we are.” When clearly no one does. But telling other people who they are enables us feel better about having no clue whatsoever who we are ourselves. The fallacy of self-identity is that we have no idea who we are unless we have others to compare ourselves to. For the most part anyway. You may be one of those trail blazing individuals always pushing the limits of self identity and defining and redefining who you are and your place in this world everyday, and I hope you feel great about that. If I were to guess though, you probably don’t feel great. You lot are usually more tortured than everyone else. The rest of us however, we’re just one more faceless fish in the sea. One more lost and confused bag of barely self-aware water meandering around the dark. Only when we bump into someone else do we then have any idea who or what we are.

I’ve always felt like I knew what I was, what I wanted to be I guess would be more accurate, but I’ve always felt like I am here to write. I’ve always felt like I am a writer. I remember in junior high I would always scratch out my frustrations in one of those black and white composition book. You know the ones that haven’t changed at all in the past 60 years. I wrote a lot. Daily in fact. Poetry was my vice. Sometimes I’d write it to some sort of beat and call it a song — I played guitar back then. Another interest that waned as I grew older. I have a notebook overflowing with loose leaf pages worn from being passed around class to my friends who at least pretended to like my writing. Writing things in the margins like, “I love this!” or “Never stop writing!” Always encouraging me to do more. I think it was this early encouragement, whether it was founded in kindness or in actual fact, that embedded deep in my personality the need to write. I don’t know if you caught that but I said, “the need to write.” “The need need to write” should not be confused with what should likely be the reflex action compared to such a need — actually writing. While the action of writing may seem to logically follow the need to write, it is not the case with me.

As I’ve grown older my need to write has increased while my ability to actually write has inversely decreased. Life gets busy, and some things just get put on the sideline. It’s this benching of my desire to write that has driven me to want to write more and also feel like I can no longer write at all. Like an old man watching football on the TV, he dreams of his twenties when he could once run like they could. When he could once catch and tackle like the best of them. He stands up and feels starkly aware of every bone in his body as they all crack and grind together at once. He feels his back twinge with the warning to take it slow or face the consequences. He realizes with a very real and self-aware feeling absent of doubt, that he can never run like that again. And in turn I’ve felt like I can never write like that again. I stopped for too long. Writing is a perishable skill. We always use the phrase “I’m just a little rusty,” when we return to something we haven’t done in a long time, but we don’t acknowledge the fact that there are limits. Eventually the oxidation levels in the metal of that classic cherry red Schwinn you had stowed behind the garage that you always told yourself you’d take out for a ride “next weekend,” of course, rise and the inevitable layer of rust develops. So much rust develops that it begins to eat away the metal. No amount of polishing can return your pretty bike to its original state. It is gone forever. Slowly chewed away by time you have lost your bike to nature, and I have lost my writing voice to her as well.

At least that’s how I feel anyway. I feel like I’ve lost my voice forever. There’s nothing more depressing than realizing that something in your life is not at all the way you want it because of a conscious choice that you made yourself. We rationalize much of life’s misgivings and random fuck-you’s by this untouchable and unquestionable force we refer to as fate. We find solace in the fact that whatever it is we are dealing with is shitty, but there’s nothing we could have done to prevent it. It is what it is, we say. Occasionally however, we fuck it up. We are the ones to blame and no one else, and when you realize that, there is no stopping the express train to regret and guilt. I stopped writing. No one else made me stop. I could have kept writing all these years and would probably be an incredible writer by now, right? Well, maybe not, but I’d certainly have a better chance than 18 year old me gave myself. Giving up for no reason but laziness.

Is writing like exercise? Can I just start working at it again piece by piece until it comes back? I was sitting at my desk looking at all the various post-it notes, bills and random papers that make up the documentation of my own piece of the overworked, underpaid, attention deficient hyper-drive American life and the urge to write had finally beat out my urge to delay it and avoid it any more. I told myself I will make time and force myself to write everyday. I will be published. After all the shit I’ve read all these years, how can it be that hard? What does it take to write a compelling story? What does it take finish an entire novel? It seems like such an insurmountable task. Writing an entire novel. All of the elements that build up a successful and interesting novel seems like more than any one person could do. When I think of the great novels written in history I can barely imagine that they were actually written by a real person. I almost have this fantastical image of all of the stories that could ever be told in history are already told. Floating around the nether like stars flying through immeasurable space. Everyone one of those stories has a voice here in a person on Earth — a prophet if you will. When that person is ready to write it’s that like story is beamed from the universal consciousness right into their mind and they then put pen right to paper. How else could any of these stories exist? It’s like imagining how the pyramids were built thousands of years ago before modern tools or machinery. It just makes no sense. How did Tolkien dream up the entire world of Middle Earth and all of its inhabitants? It seems impossible. So I imagine all the entirety of the written consciousness of mankind, what we call literature, has basically been pre-created and predestined to go to a single person. A single prophet. A single writer. So I wonder if I have a story. Will one of these stories come down to me on its own one night while I’m sleeping? Or do you have to catch it. Do you have to make a conscious effort to reach into the stream and pull out your story? Pull out the un-manifested piece of literature that is still a beam of light zooming around the realm of human consciousness and has yet to be written by its one true voice. The one that has your name on it. What does it take to catch your story? What are all the elements it takes to create a new world? Thinking about all these questions which seemed to just dig the hole of my doubt and discouragement deeper and deeper, I realized one unquestionable fact. Whether you are building a sand castle or the vast fields of Middle Earth there’s one thing that is constant: a start.

And amidst all of my doubt and all of my hesitation to start one more thing that I will never finish, I did what I just realized every great writer in history has done as well. There’s no end without a beginning and there’s no beginning without a start. I realized I’m never closer to the end than when I finally decide to begin, and I started. I started writing.