I need to write some happier things; by that I don’t mean a fluffy fairy tale with a protagonist-gets-the-girl ending. I mean something a lot more hopeful… Realistically, I’m in the best position I’ve ever been, and yet, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually I’m a wreck. All I’m good for at the moment is tearing into books and strip mining them for all the ideas I can. But this is work that needs doing. It’s what I can do at the moment, and soon, I will start sharing my findings. It’s messy and probably no one will read them any time soon, but these ideas are going to inform everything I write going forward… that is the nature of discovery, of the autodidactic process. You find what you will use going forward and only bring that forward, while everything else can be left behind…
This is why I have Obscure Curiosities, to have a record of the things I’ll likely choose to forget about later. And I’m finally at the point where I’ve now forgotten more than I’ve learned. A lot of it needs to be forgotten, even more to be unlearned, but what to replace it with? That’s the question I need to answer… if I’m not writing novels or “proper” essays, then what am I doing? You can call it digital gardening. I just call it learning things, working on ideas that clearly haven’t been worked on enough. But unlike the academics, I want to make these ideas actionable. And some of these books I’ve read, they’re so close to providing a way forward, but just fall short.
In any case, change starts with the individual, and too many individuals are complacent in their narrow-focused ways. Others are much too anxious and have tunnel vision pointed inward. I have the tools at my disposal to produce writings at a breakneck speed, even greater than anything I’ve done previously. But speed isn’t really what I need. I need my words to punch well above their weight class. I need them to not shout above the noise, but sneak their way into the right ears, but with enough force that they stick.
Lately, I feel myself becoming even more separate from everyone else, even if I know this isn’t actually the case. I don’t really know how to exist in the world any more. It’s like I live in a different world from everyone else; I can’t even explain to Emily what I’m feeling because I don’t have the language for it yet.
