The Paradigm Shift

So I thought I should post an actual blog, as opposed to my self-serving pieces of fiction. But it's fun, is it not?

Okay, so let's talk. Future. What is the future? My mom keeps pestering me about this abstract concept of having a "job" after college. First off,  such things do not exist. Fairy tale. More likely to find a unicorn after college. So of course I keep trucking in my absolutely esoteric academic focus: writing.

So let me validate myself a little. I'm not going to be so vain as to say that I think I'm just damn good enough to make it on my own, off the written word. It's hard to get people to pay you for what you do with a pen, or a computer keyboard. Like everyone else who wants to make a living off this type of stuff, I'll have to secure myself a "real" job (pfft. unicorns) and just write on my off time. This most likely won't relate at all to what I'm doing in school now, but I think I like the idea of that. I want to spend a few years, maybe a decade or two, pulling my head out of my ass enough to look at everything around me and gain a sense of what the grounded world looks like. I think if I just nosedived into writing as a career, I'd get completely lost in my interiority. I've been in these places, and it's kind of scary to just keep falling into that pit of contemplation.

I don't know. I think I saved a boy's life. He was this sixteen-year old at a Halloween dance party, and he had that hallowed look in his eyes. And me, on some kind of high of happiness and feeling the thrust of life, I gave him this speech. He probably affected me more than I did him, actually. This was probably the first time I'd actually felt like I'd touched someone. I'd removed myself from myself and actually listened to someone else. All night he'd been very annoying, and I'd been telling him to bugger off or whatever. Then I entertained the thought of listening to him, and I don't know. It felt good to just be totally about someone else for once.

Words! I touched him with words! Words aren't really anything in themselves. Once you start giving them agency you lose the ability to manipulate them. You become their slave, and you fear doing them a disservice. Words are really the bridges we build. Like, I have these thoughts in my head, and I want to convey those thoughts to other people. So what I do is I sit down and I write my thoughts on the page, and maybe, hopefully, someday someone out there will happen upon this bridge. Even if we're far removed in space and time, there will be a connection made between us. This is the "meaning" of life, in my book. We're here to relate to each other and form deep relationships with people. Life itself is so full of tragedy, and so we build these connections to each other as a way of creating our own meaning. We define our own "meanings" of life by the relationships we form.

I want to do this. I ramble a lot, and I tend to be redundant, and I can't ever really articulate my thoughts out loud, but I feel like I can connect to people, or maybe just learn to connect to people, through writing. I feel like both of my parents had all this energy boiling up inside them. From what I can tell they both have this intense interiority. It's beautiful and passionate in one way, but sometimes I think they kind of self-destructed because they never found an outlet for this. Instead they tried to fit themselves into social molds they felt comfortable with on the front end and just boiled over on the inside. Even if I just end up telling the story of my life and of the people around me, and this just sits on my bookshelf while I go on forming a family and hopefully starting a career, I think I can be happy. Writing is often tormenting, but I've found the pay off to be so much greater than the pain on the front end. Interiority on the page becomes beautiful, where on the inside it holds the capacity for ruin.

I think these are the reasons I'm telling myself it's okay to take years of very expensive school to craft something that's not strictly utilitarian. It's a process of self-aggrandizement, sure, but I think it's necessary. It's the reason I started this whole blog thing to begin with. To call it therapy would kind of dust at the top of the iceberg, but I think it's a worthy summary. What's the end of this writing? I'm not sure.

I do know that it feels right. When I finally admitted to myself that this was what I was going to try and do with myself, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. I remember the night I decided this. I was walking over to Fido's to have some coffee with Ellen, and the world suddenly felt full of purpose and brightness where before it had just been a burden, a forest that I had to wade through and cross my fingers that I'd taken the right path. Paths, paths. It's not a path thing. It used to be a path thing. Now? It's fearlessness. The future's hazy and more unpredictable than I can imagine, but I don't fear it. I feel like I have a sense of purpose, and that no matter where I go or what I do, I'll do just fine because I'll be happy.

I do feel happy.