I suspect that the terror is inevitable when you study things too closely. The hardest part is the feeling of failure that creeps alongside it. I remember the circumstances that drove me to give up photography over a decade ago—it was the pain and hurt of the people that I couldn’t help, and my total inability to make any sort of a significant difference to anyone. In short, I could no longer sustain “just doing it” when the results of my visual examinations were ultimately negative in the end— an endless pursuit of entropy where chaos and darkness always win. Failing to find a way off that track, failing to find a constructive rather than deconstructive resolution to any given problem seems inevitable.

I turned to writing as an alternative, because when you put the words down they aggregate and accrete in surprising ways; this blog was a sort of laboratory for that. I can remember just taking a drive down the street, or a walk around the block to find something to describe so that it just might configure itself into something larger, to find some sort of resonance with a bigger more important concept or idea. But that began to shift when I became a serious student of writing, rather than someone who just did it. I think that has a lot to do with it—the terror is creeping into this again because the stakes have become higher, the audience broader, and my ego more fragile.

I think part of the solution will be to try to turn off the part of me that realizes that there are other people in the world who might read or care about any of this. When I write about my feelings, it seems to come across as a call for involvement or help. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m not looking for any sort of affirmation, just progress. I have been living a relentlessly private life for well over a year now, and it is changing me in ways that I don’t like. I need to write for at least a small/implied audience in order to move forward. My personal side, ultimately, is pretty stable and not a matter for anyone’s concern. It just helps to blurt things out sometimes to move forward.

It is artificial and unhealthy to stifle the personal, as I have for quite some time. All perspectives are ultimately personal, and any significant changes ones of transformation and identification. I need to change my suppressive tendencies and open back up again; this requires no response. It’s just something I need to write out.

Any writing project involves just doing a big blurt to get things out. The first few pages are nearly always thrown away. I’d like to throw away the past year and just “do it” again.