I've been having trouble writing lately, and after a bit of reflection, I realise it's because I don't tell enough emotional truth.
When I don't acknowledge the depth of my feelings and hopes, I am clamping down on who I am in a way that doesn't actually benefit me, or anyone around me. I keep quiet about stuff, I tell myself a sanitised version of things. I'm not saying I should be in some kind of uncontrolled verbal-diarrhoea-type-state, but that effectively I'm spending a lot of my time in that wide and expansive place that has so much room for so many of us - De Nial. I keep my own secrets from myself so well that over time I forget them. I hold my opinion so quietly that after a while it fades away. While non-attachment is generally a good thing, I haven't been doing it right - my non-attachment has been a barely disguised form of giving up. That's not good.
I thought about this when I was watching New Amsterdam. One of the things I like about John is that he stays authentic to himself - he tells the truth. He lives his life, and accumulates and looses, relationships, knowledge, stuff, love, family. If the people around him paid attention to what he says, they'd soon figure out his secret, but most of them don't. This is the privacy we have in the modern world - disinterest. Is there a cost? Sure there is! He's treated like a nutter by most of his colleagues, but he holds this in balance with the freedom of living his own truth.
The cost in my life from trying to control everyting from changing, or being lost, or forgotten or hurting has been to slowly ossify in a set of behavious that I never really wanted, but seemed like a good compromise at the time. This is what makes my writing stilted and slightly forced, and quick to dry up - because the price of control is a closed, entropic system, slowly leaking energy towards stasis.
I guess that it effects other parts of my life, but I can't really see them. I can only see it through the prism of this one frustration. Everything else in my life I seem to fatalistically accept as my lot. This systemic link to my own (previously useful survivial) behaviours and the current broader state of impasse has slowly emerged in front of my mind like lemon juice on paper under heat - I swear it wasn't there a minute ago! But now that it is, I better make a copy of it before it fades (trap for the new players with the lemon juice thing!) and make a move.
3 comments:
Don't think this is mainly a function of you, J9, but more a function of social pressures in our sunny but deeply alienated land. It's hard to say what you want, even to yourself, much less make authentic choices. It's good you have your writing as a kind of litmus test to see if you are connected to your authentic self. Be glad you're not just overrun by the script - I think most white educated middle/upper-middle class Aussies are.
Don't underestimate the power of the matrix or how much you succeed in fighting it!
xxx Sunsmoke
What Sunsmoke wrote is not only true of the Aussies she describes, but true also of the 'over-privileged' Westerner (or Aussie) everywhere.
You've articulated something, J9, that I struggle with all the time too. My own ideas about the source of stasis are less articulate and more spirituality based, but now I wonder if De Nial isn't just as large a player.
The reason I come back to your blog is because of your articulations.
Thank you both for your honesty. It's good to have some fellow travellers. Very good.
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