This is my last post for a while.
I declare this with all the certainty of an A.A. graduate who soberly vows to never drink while holding a glass of wine. That’s as certain as my certain gets.
Writing is my drug. As with everything, writing is productive in healthy doses but counterproductive in extremes. For the past month, I made a point to write every single day, whether privately in my journal, more publicly on this blog, or professionally in college publications. Sorting through jumbled thoughts and transferring them out of my mental jungle was a priority because I thought doing that would unlock the biggest unsolved mystery in my life: self.
In some ways, it did. The memoir remains unwritten, but the first sentence would read:
“I am as much a slave as empress to my own realm.”
Owning my thoughts at this age, while a worthwhile attempt, is like hopping on a fast-moving train and asking the inexperienced conductor to come to a sudden halt without screeching brakes. It’s not possible. You can’t just stop the wheels of a moving mind, whirring at thousands of rpms per seconds for two decades, and expect new free falls of understanding to arrive. The elusive search for self comes smoothly and gradually only after years of experience.
I recently received an interesting comment from a reader:
Despite the fact that you obviously enjoy writing and sharing your thoughts with others, and the fact that this website serves as an outlet for you to do so…..by spending any appreciable amount of time talking/writing about things that you want to do or things that you want to change (such as the current state of your education), you are losing the time that is available to actually go do those things; in essence, you are directly contributing to the vicariousness that you regret by reflecting so deeply on such abstract thoughts. You would probably do a better job of finding your “self” by immersing yourself in activity — losing yourself — than by searching directly for some answer that doesn’t exist in a single source.
And he/she is absolutely right. I cannot allow my life to be defined by a stream of posts, photos, tweets, and blog entries that are published under the justification of self-expression, connection, and looking within. Truly finding yourself involves venturing out and stumbling across a problem that summons your presence. Duly noted.
However, it’s also equally important to mention that the value of this advice would have fallen on deaf ears had I not been writing regularly up to this point. It is only through the lengthy process of thinking, filtering, and fleshing out thoughts in writing that my conscience can fully appreciate the observation that life’s calling does not exist within, but out there. It is only through writing and listening to myself that I know it is my instinct to rathole and I now must find my way out of the hole to uncover life’s possibilities.
“We need to stop asking the meaning of life, but rather what life expects from us. Think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life- daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and conduct.”
- David Brooks, ‘The Social Animal’
Right on, Mr. Brooks. (Stop being so wise.)
So I’m withdrawing, detaching- whatever you want to call it- yes, killing these virtual musings of mine. My experiences in Europe will be mine alone, and yes life will no longer seem so stimulating because no one will be telling me how well I write nor validating how awesome my life is via a push of a button on my artfully written status nor commenting on how pretty I look in that mobile upload. I’ll turn to my close friends and family for ego stroking.
I speculate but maybe, just maybe in living a life undocumented and unshared, I’ll cease to be dispersed into a cloud of electronic input and finally find not what I can write to life, but how life itself writes my story.
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