Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Be in love with your life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind the unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language, knowledge
Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
You're a Genius all the time
This stuff hit me pretty hard, sad as it is to say. As someone who imagines herself to be a writer, I spend very little time writing; my new job at this coffee place downtown takes up a lot of my energy (I think during my interview I was a little too enthusiastic about the possibility of opening at 5:30 in the morning, but it's not so bad), and now that I have a somewhat social life, I spend my days off blustering around. Not that I'm wasting my time, quite the contrary; I've had a better Christmas season than the past two, when there was nothing to do and no one to do it with. But my New Year's resolution '09 was (I think) to publish something, and unless that Erotic Short that I wrote for that show in February was accepted, then we can count this year as un-resolved. In any case, it's inspired me to keep a writing journal, but it's been harder and harder for me to keep a clear head that would facilitate writing. In violation of my usual blog-rule of keeping my personal life out of my posts, here are some vague reasons why:
-Probably still bitter about getting my heart all broke this summer;
-Wanting to have financial independence but being unable to keep two nickels to rub together, hence too often being stressed about self-inflicted financial problems;
-Thinking that I have the best of intentions but then realizing possibly too late that I'm more selfish than I am generous;
-Having feelings I can't express for various reasons, leaving them like the bitter aftertaste of hazelnuts in my mouth;
-Being afraid of what I can't control;
-Refusing to accept that I can't control it;
-Hating myself for all of the above, and
-Causing myself undue stress, pain, and depression from all that self-hatred.
What sucks the most is that all of that crap is internalized--it isn't something that anyone else has anything to do with, and it isn't something that affects anyone else. This means that I have to take responsibility for and deal with it on my own. The horrible thing about 2009 is that, despite all the sea changes that I've experienced, it's been a grand old time for disappointments, or at least let-downs. I don't want to list them all, they'd end up being redundant, and a lot of them are either resolved or don't cause me any worry any more. But it's still weight that I've carried, and though I might be mostly relieved, a lot of the experience has left me weakened, which makes the whole internalization even worse: I can't ask anyone for help. I have to deal with it on my own.
This situation ought to be more of a challenge than a burden. I have caused or suffered all of my problems alone, I should deal with them alone, thus making me the only one who can give myself strength. I'm too good at doing the opposite; discussing my issues to the point of whining and then placing all my self-worth in the opinions that others have of me (though it isn't a peer-group thing, usually it's one or two people on whom all my happiness relies). My best friend, who is one of the people who I rely on, called this unhealthy, and I can't think of a better possible word. My refusal to rely on myself takes me too often to a perceived point of no return, and I end up drowning in myself. When I was a teenager, it was simple self-pity, but now it's self-loathing, which is more dangerous: I am the person I trust the least and fear the most.
And yes, this is all complete naval-gazing, but like I said, my problems demand such a vantage point. What I am going through is petty compared to what many others experience in their lives. There is no point where I can call what I feel sorrow. But this is all the more reason to confront it, and the perspective of "other people have it worse" changes the approach I take but it doesn't make the workload any smaller. And if I do want to, as Kerouac writes, be in love with my life, I have to find some sort of love for myself. And I can't do that simply by listing off my better qualities. I know that there are things that make me a good person. I strive to be a good person. But, as Owen Wilson said in Zoolander, I gotta straighten some shit out.
So this will be my pre-New Year's Resolution: by Friday, I will expand upon the above list of vague things that are wrong with me, and make an outline of what to do and how to approach each issue when it rears its ugly head. It's a very self-help-five-step-program way to do it, but I think that my happiness and the happiness that those I care about the most-- who are too often hurt by what I've done--is more important than my pride or my insistence on being tortured. I would rather get over myself and use that energy to be creative, and do what I'd hoped to accomplish this year. And it may have taken me a long time to figure all of this out, and it happened only because my life started to strain me more than ever, but at least it's happening. I intend to make the most of it.
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