I don’t usually suffer from writer’s block, but I do suffer from something a lot like it: not-sure-what-to-write-about…itude. (I don’t know the proper suffix.)
“Writer’s block” certainly sounds more eloquent. But there’s an important difference between the two things. Writer’s block is when you don’t know what to write. Where the words simply won’t come. I have no problem with finding words to say things. No, not-sure-what-to-write-aboutitude is a problem that happens at a different level—a higher level.
Not-sure-what-to-write-aboutitude has to do with all sorts of big questions. Who am I writing for? What do they need? What do they think they need? Do I think those two things are the same? Why am I writing for them? What difference will it make? Will it make any difference? What if none of this matters?
And then I’m right back there at that familiar place, that cliff of meaninglessness, that dark and scary pit into which some part of me has always believed we’re all slowly falling. And I wonder, once again, if I believe on some fundamental level of me-ness that none of it matters, that none of it has meaning, and that we’re all here to do some kind of perverse dance for a few years until we vanish into the eons the universe has yet to churn out.
In other words, a crisis of faith. (I realize it might sound like depression, but it really isn’t. I love being alive, having experiences, connecting with myself and others. I’m excited to be a father and a husband and to build a writing career and to see what happens today, and tomorrow, and on into the future. The universe is filled with magic and delight, and when I’m fully absorbed in those things, all my big mopey questions evaporate into the silliness they are. And yet…)
And yet.
And yet that silliness often feels like seriousness. Like the most serious thing there is. And there we go. I’ve completed another small circle from faithlessness to faith and back again.
The embarrassing thing here isn’t the the contortions of feeling I find myself going through. It’s that I’m pretty sure I know the way out of them, and I continue to be too afraid to take it. No—perhaps that’s too judgmental of myself. It’s not that I’m afraid, so much as that I don’t want to yet. I’m not ready to lose myself.
Because that is the answer: to lose myself. Or, maybe it’s clearer to say “my self.” To learn how, through meditation and spiritual practice, to allow my sense of my ego—my Thinker, in the parlance of my book, The Forest is the Tree—to dissolve back into the fabric of the reality which birthed it. I know at some level, deep down, that I’m not me—that I’m not Michael. But I’m afraid to fully recognize that truth, because it is death. I’m afraid of death, still. After all these years.
Anyway, this post began with not-sure-what-to-write-aboutitude. And we can see, both from the long gap in blog posts here (it’s been more than six years since my last one) and from the vast and mildly embarrassing difference in content (I used to write about resumes and a coaching business which always made me feel like a bit of a fraud), not-sure-what-to-write-aboutitude is nothing new for me. I just never named it until now.
But I think I have at least resolved the worst of the unsettledness, the searching, the grasping. None of the things I tried before worked because none of them were a fit for who I was. For what I was most interested in. Which is… well. It’s kind of everything. And that’s kind of the problem. Ok, ok. Not problem, exactly. It’s a feature of being me. And that’s just fine. But, still. I don’t want to write about resumes or a coaching business that never came to be, or even, really, about tutoring the LSAT—which is a business that I’ve had good success with.
I want to write about… this. About what it’s like to be alive. To be human. To be, to a lesser degree, me.
(I am aware that I generally attempt to avoid that last topic—myself—out of a mild sense that I ought to try to be less egocentric—along the lines of what I just mentioned earlier about spiritual practice—but, really, at a fundamental level, me is the only thing I know in all the universe. Humanness and aliveness are sort of second-order effects—at least when looked at from a Cartesian perspective.)
Because, really, I actually don’t want to write about myself at all. I want to write about us. I want you to see yourself reflected in my words. To sense where that reflection holds true, and where it is different. To come to know yourself and your existence more intimately. I want to show you the world (here it occurs to me that maybe I’m just parroting Aladdin, but if so I guess that’s funny enough, so let’s roll with it). The trouble, of course, is that I can’t show you the world. You must look for yourself. Everything you see is but mirrored to you through your own Observer. And since that’s also true for me, then it seems at least partly true that the only way I can point anything out to you at all is to use myself as the pointer. But I hope my intentions are good. I like to think they are, anyway. That I’m not trying to talk about myself, but about the infinite, ineffable way that we are the same. So, yeah. To reflect. To be a mirror. That’s not egocentric, right?
…right? Hmm…
And with that, we’ve hit writer’s block. Time to wrap up!