There came a time when the very words I wrote began to irritate me. Why could I not write a straight sentence anymore? Why was it becoming so hard to express what I wanted to? Why could I no longer write about the way I felt inside?
So many questions, and yet, when asked, I wouldn't even be able to frame them in a way that would make sense to anyone else. Thus the process of shutting down began.
The new semester has begun, and this one, like the ones before it, makes me want to dance some of the time, and cry the rest of the time. But it also brought to me, most unexpectedly, a few pages that made me do a rethink about the whole idea of shutting-down. A few pages that discussed the way we tend to write these days, without really needing to think, without needing to question the words we are using, without even considering if we could just strip what we write of the extra embellishments and get back to the essence of what we want to say. It made me think about whether there was anything I really wanted to say.
As usual, I could think of nothing that was worth the effort of thinking through and then articulating in a form lucid enough to be put up where it could be read by people other than just me. Which is when I remembered that most of the pieces I'd actually enjoyed writing were those which had required no conscious thought or planning. These were things I'd written because it was in me and needed to flow out somehow.
So what did that mean? Those pages that made me think - were they entirely useless? I don't think so. It made me see why I had begun to lose the ability to write. I was getting bogged down by the way other people wrote - the feeling that perhaps that was how it should be done. I'd almost lost what it was to be me, except that I was so sad that I knew something was seriously wrong somewhere.
So now I'm back, and will be writing things that I need to; and I will try to reclaim the rest of me, that I'd lost along the way. Imagine - bits of me discarded just because I was acting stupid!
