Entry #01
NEW WRITING
On my return home, I began a new journey. It was as if I had arrived at the last bus stop. I passed all of the previous stops, on a specific track, carried along with many others, until we reached the end. The bus pulled away in a cloud of dust and we were left to wander off in our own seperate ways.
I rekindled old friendships which soon became my community. An old friend became a roommate. I skated more and managed a skateshop. I navigated Covid with my mother and my parent’s divorce. My next relationship began during this transition, my maturity from a student to an independent adult, at work in my community and learning how to become an active memeber within it. My relationship with S. began within that community, a large group of friends across several age groups, that allowed me to feel at home and further incorporate myself within the community. The transition of her life at the time was the same as mine. We had both recently graduated college and were intent on building our careers. For several years this lasted. We traveled, we aquired new jobs, and we discovered more about ourselves and each other in the process. Eventually, S. set her sights on moving to a city, somewhere where she could further challenge herself and experience more of the world outside of our small town. Despite my willingness to join, there was something larger at play, a new transition that each of us would need to embark on our own.
This brings me to where I am now, which is a transition into self-reliance. It is the same transition for S. but our paths had diverged. We ran the course of our previous transition together and when the time came, we realized that our next transition would have to be done by ourselves. The reason I anticipate I will be in this place for some time is because it is the purpose of this transition, to better understand what it is like to be on my own, to learn how to rely more fully on myself, and to grow and improve my life on my own.
In many ways I have done this, at my own pace, and in a way that is purposeful to me. The previous year was an exercise in output. I became more involved in my community and branched out into others. I took the opportunity to work in a new community and help build that community, while integrating myself further within it. I began a magazine project which was a vehicle to work with significant people I had met, and to learn more about them and their own communities in the process. This project was incredibly rewarding because I was able to provide value in some small way to these people and to help build something in the community. The project demanded that I reach out, invite people in, and ask for their trust that I could deliver what I hoped to deliver. This promise and the opportunity that each individual gave, as well as the encouragement from the community, became the fuel to drive the project and allowed me to have a goal to work on, and to learn along the way how to deliver the best product that I could. This became the first project where I put myself out there and shared work with my community.
The next project will be less about output and more about input, by which I mean I intend to look closer into myself, my experiences, and my writing practice. Although certain experiences are still too close to write about in a detatched way, I will attempt to look at experiences and observations as a means to grow as a writer, investigate who I am, and what I would like to be. It will be an opportunity to invite ideas and to interpret what is important to me, what I find valuable, and recognize that for myself. For the next several months I will invest in writing, commit to it as I already have, not for others but for myself. I may feel lost, as I often do, but like drawing, music, or art of any kind, I must trust that I will find my way. I will emerge out of this transition as something new. I will continue to work on the person that I hope to be.
There are important objectives that I would like to implement in my writing which are the big three: Imagery. Action. Feeling. The way to best acheive these things is through the description of the senses; sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. I want to learn how to write better and to write with these objectives in mind, but I don’t know what to write about. I continue to start and stop. I want to do one project and then I want to do another. I want to have a clear goal and then I want to have no goal. I want to hold on and then I want to let go. I want to have a project and then I want to have no project. I fear that I use writing as a distraction from more important things. I fear that I hold on to it as my identity and purpose too tightly. But I also want to produce interesting work, so bad that I feel that I must be dedicated to it, that I must devote time out of each day to do it. How can I liberate myself from these feelings? How can I be easier on myself? How can I write something that challenges me and also feels natural? I don’t need it to feel easy, but I want it to feel purposeful. Perhaps that is the problem, my need for it to serve a purpose. When in reality, I am trying to look away from others, look away from what should be done, what expecations I might have, and do something unexpected, something radically different. What could that be? Perhaps, I need to abandon everything and try fiction. Maybe that will get me closer to the truth.