Passages, March 2021

I Write Passages So I May Make My Own

I’ve always found my writing to be motivated by anger. I cannot write on things that don’t matter to me, selfishly. I struggle just as much coming up with solutions or envisioning anything positive. Most of the time, I just focus on whatever the opposing force to the good thing I’m focused on is, and motivate myself in pure contrast to it. The only thing I can seem to produce is criticisms and snide remarks, which gets very little done, shockingly.

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Fear and anger have been motivators too. I get through the day to live to the next, which is not really living, as previously established. What happens when, in just a few hundred days, I’ve reached what I was living slanted towards? What scares me most is losing this well-noted ability of mine. Contentions on narcissism and self-examination aside, what if I come out the other end with nothing left to say? Was something stolen from me by the end, did I lose? Or was this burden handed off to me with a known intention to one day take it back, to pass to someone else?

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I’ve spent so much time justifying him in my mind that I can play all sides. I am my own judge and jury, with a part-time side gig as executioner. The rest of the time, that gleaming axe is carried by another me, loop ending and loop beginning, comprising the entirety of the loop. This has been previously noted. Can one die from a sudden drought in murderous vocabulary? When the time comes, who will I find underneath me? Something new, and growing. Something hurt, but healing. Or will my future not be in green but in gray, and will my position’s plaster be removed to reveal a concrete sludge, forever imprinted and shaped by the unwelcome.

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It’s easy for me to say a man obsessed with image got me into this mess. I’d like to pretend that I am only still spinning for the vanity of displaying my unlikely, yet continuing survival, as a trait of his own creation. But that’s not actually the whole truth. Since the very beginning I have wanted to believe that. It’s been easier to assume blind hatred directed at me than someone just as complex as I prove myself to be through typewriter-exorcism.