The new year’s started, and I have an afternoon to myself, and I have done a Productive Thing this morning already. Several, actually; a long-overdue closet clean-out, a thorough vacuuming in the bedroom, some maintenance on this very site to get its PHP up to date and everything in tidy working order.
It feels very…efficient. Sensible. Practical.
…Strangely unsatisfying. But I haven’t written in a little while, and should do that as well, so here I am.
What am I doing, here? Writing words into the void where literally nobody will see them? I don’t have a Brand to build; I’m not “creating content” that people will want to see or participate in on YouTube; I am told, over and over and over again, that nobody reads anymore, that this is why even an email three lines long is too much for heaven’s sake, let alone the amount I can write when I get going.
What am I doing? What is the point of this endeavor?
I am not one of those people who has a book in me, or at least I don’t think so; I know several of them. They are full of a drive toward something; scenes haunt them in their sleep, dialogue springs up unbidden when they are in the shower or stirring a pot of tomato sauce on the stove.
I don’t have that. Not quite. A drive, yes; an urge toward Making in a general sort of way that cooking kind of sort of helps to satisfy a little, though it does not feel like enough. “Enough” is a completely preposterous word for it; it doesn’t feel right. Enough. Ridiculous. Can you feed a fire “enough?”
I want to do…something; but here my invention fails me absolutely every single time, proving to me over and over and over again that I am just not really a creative person, not like the ones I can see on the internet – or, hell, invite for dinner – all various shades of struggling quietly toward a goal, or hustling like mad toward it in some cases.
What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing?
There never seems to be any good answer to that. One cannot make a convincing Kickstarter pitch for “fuck, I don’t know, trying to express myself and hoping something comes of it?”
Though that’s it, I guess. In the absence of a “real” dream, doing something, ANYthing, so that I do not feel quite so much as though I have been shapeshifted into a form I don’t quite recognize without anybody noticing, quietly doing the things that need doing to get by and support the people around me, wondering if the interior life I experience can properly be considered any more real than the things I was talking about in reality TV earlier.
And I don’t really know who I can talk to about it; very well then, let’s talk to nobody here. Or maybe everybody. Who knows.
I want to really feel like myself. Whatever that means.
But first I have to make lunch. For some reason, today that makes me laugh.