I've become a better writer this year. I have not put a word on paper, and yet I know that I am so, so much closer to the art that I expect of myself. And surely you would know that this blog is not where I designated my life's writing to live. Maybe, sometimes, it came to die here. But over the years this has been the space where I wanted to track my progress. Not always as a writer, but as a human being. All the lessons of life and how I experience them. And this past year this space was silent because I experienced them. All of those horrible, gritty truths we have all been through. I was forced into uncompromising realism by a virus that introduced me to new concepts such as loneliness and stagnation. But good writers aren't born, they're made.
I decided not to write anything. For the first time in my life, I listened to the voice in my head that said "you don't have to do this". Two years of a therapist telling me finally paid off, eh? I never wrote a line (I wasn't paid for) for anyone but myself and, this year, I couldn't do it for me. I needed to do nothing. I have never, and I mean it, never just sat in my feelings and watched them. This year, I had to learn to not chase the sentence, but the actual feeling. And you know, that is why I sucked at writing: you need to know who you are to write. You will otherwise write what you expect to write. This blank page right here is a mirror and I cannot expect it to reflect me if I make stupid faces all the time.
Those faces have been small, subtle lies over the years: "No, that guy didn't break my heart, I totally moved on". "Investing time into the guy I liked in High School was not a waste of time, it was a lesson." "My father was a great man deep down." "I don't know if I want to have a family." You know what's worst: I believed it myself. I was standing in front of my mirror smiling, thinking what I was putting out there was my true self. It wasn't. Anything I wrote down wasn't me. But it took me until now to know it wasn't me. Because for some reason I was unable to feel pain, and without pain those things that happened to me can't possibly be processed.
So this year I sat down to do it. I've known for a while I was using my career as a distraction, but my career wasn't going to progress so well, there went that distraction. I was still very busy because I am a privileged, lucky son of a bitch that bought an apartment and then had to deal with the painfully happy stress of organizing a new life. Again. And in those moments between that I was sitting in an empty apartment that I owned torn between agonizing loneliness and physically painful gratitude. I wouldn't change a move of my life because I did everything I could have possibly done to get me where I am. And that's where the problem was lying: I was always doing it, always nailing it. It takes a global pandemic for me to face the demons because, trust me, I would have found a way not to because I do everything I want to, and usually successfully.
So I couldn't actually write because I wouldn't have nailed it. My feelings were actually happening off the paper for once. I am new to many of the feelings of this year, so I was new to writing about them. It makes me feel so insufficient that I cannot write a sentence about what I feel when I listen to "This Year's Love". Nobody could ever understand what this song means to me. Of course there are lyrics that are not hard to interpret, although I didn't as a child listening to this song for the first time not knowing English. But I had to be today years old to understand what this song means. Because sometimes it takes understanding life to understanding a written word. And because of that, my words couldn't have the correct meaning.
What does this mean for the future? Probably nothing. Actually learning how to be "mad" is just a really good lesson and will hopefully mean I make less mistakes, especially with men. Understanding that "sadness" isn't a bad emotion was also necessary and probably essential to being the writer I want to be. I feel more than myself than ever because, well, I don't care that I am lame. And now often lazy and introverted. I wanna be that. I bought my first ever TV in 2021 and am enjoying watching "How To Get Away With Murder" with ice cream for hours. That's never happened. I was never that person. Or maybe I was, who knows. I don't think about it anymore, I'm just doing whatever I'm doing. No reasons. Just being.
