Talking to Myself

Some mornings, as I sit at my computer composing a post, I don’t write what’s on my mind at the moment.  Instead, I compose words that suit the mood I’d like to be in.  Or I attempt to use words to manufacture emotions I’d rather have than the ones I feel at the time. So, instead of exposing what’s on my mind at the moment, I create something else; it’s not artificial, it just isn’t necessarily real at the moment. It’s emotional time-shifting, for want of a better term.

When I realize what I’m doing, I feel intensely lonely. I feel as if there is no one with whom to have the conversations I want to have.  So, I have other conversations.

I get the job at hand done, usually, with a post that satisfies my self-imposed requirement that something, anything, get written.  But I know the post doesn’t satisfy my craving for conversations with people who might share my sensibilities at that moment.

I half-expected joining a group of writers here where I live would put me in the company of people whose motivations to write are like mine.  I hoped—wished is probably a more realistic term—to meet and talk to people whose emotions lapped at the banks of the same channels where mine flow. But I don’t feel that sense of camaraderie, at least not yet, with my fellow writers.  Maybe it’s because I don’t know them well enough.  Maybe, when we talk, they are guarding their emotions as carefully as I am guarding mine. I feel many things deeply, with intense passion or fear or loathing or anger.  Many people, I think, find my intensity uncomfortable, at best. And, so, I try to muffle it; generally, I am relatively successful.  Maybe that’s as it should be.

I’d rather be able to have honest conversations about things I think and feel and believe, conversations in which nothing is off-limits, no desire or craving or disgust or any other feeling or emotion is taboo. As I consider this matter, I think I may see where I am allowing myself to get stuck; I am in Hot Springs Village, a bastion of conservatism and age-related resistance to the unknown.  I think venturing into the community of artists and writers in Hot Springs proper may be what I need to do.

Now, will I do it, or will I continue to allow myself to box my emotions in, releasing them only through the relief valve of this blog?  Even this blog is insufficient, of course, because I dare not risk having all the conversations I want to have here, not even conversations with myself.  Why should I care about offending sensibilities?  I have all sorts of reasons.

Yesterday, at a workshop on character development, the presenter asserted that writers cannot create three-dimensional characters until they truly know themselves. She said the process of writing is hard and painful and revelatory; it requires “not stopping when it gets too emotional, but pushing through it.”  She said she thought she knew herself until one day, well into her forties, she learned, through writing, she had not known who she was all those years.  I understand exactly what she was saying. Now, I should act on her admonition.

Off to “push through it.”

About John Swinburn

"Love not what you are but what you may become."― Miguel de Cervantes
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2 Responses to Talking to Myself

  1. I hope you are right, M. And I’m delighted you’ll join the gathering; it will be fun and, I hope, the beginning of a routine.

  2. M says:

    Your upcoming gathering is a step in the direction you seek; I envision it as the birth of a non-residential writers’ colony. I am honored to be included.

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