Under Heaven

In which our Hero decides it’s past time to get a few things off his chest

Some days, Gentle Reader, I have just barely enough energy, just barely enough self-awareness, that I can look at myself as a whole and say that something is not right. Or at least, that something has changed, and I’m not entirely sanguine with the new state of affairs. But if I had to characterize my current state, I’d say that I seem to be suffering from a paralytic case of having grown up, and I’m not at all pleased. I spend my days working, and that overlaps into my nights. I have what feels like an endless task list and almost no coherent time in which to act on it. I have decisions to make, and made and yet I act on none of them.

And of course, I don’t write.

That last one is the most telling to me. As improbable as it was when I first started, the act of writing was a compulsion. Don’t mistake me, I was cheerfully drawn by the attention in your notes, Gentle Reader, but even without your warm company, I needed to write, I needed to put words in a row, and now… now I am silent. I don’t talk much, to anyone, about anything.

But I don’t do anything else either. I look at all of the personal growth over the space of years and I’m beginning to wonder if I haven’t managed to achieve the workaholic neglect that I’ve always striven to avoid. And now I can say, I’m not a workaholic but only because I’m so ineffective, not because I’m not working. I can say it because I’m doing multiple jobs poorly instead of any of them well.

And of course, I don’t write.

The fact is that like the textures of pollens in millennial stone, even the unwritten tells a story in my diary. What I have seen in the past is that after a significant ebb in my writing here, I come back and talk about what has been keeping me away, and whatever it is, it is a sorrow, or it is a difficulty, or it is a mistake, or it is a misprioritization.

I wish that I felt like today was different. I mean, my main motive in writing today is just that I have a quiet few minutes in which to frantically jot something down and break the dry spell. But there’s clearly a need for change, I can see it, I can feel it. I just can’t seem to do anything about it. There aren’t enough hours in the day. And I don’t eat enough junk food to artificially sustain me running much under 6 hours of sleep a night.

So. What is the goal? Honestly? 500 words in 300 seconds. Which used to be easy, but now I find the need to fix and adjust and tweak and I couldn’t resist the impulse here, and thus… not today. But what I did achieve was writing something, anything. As for what’s next? I guess it’s catching up and planning forward.

But I’m alive. Go me, I guess.