The Starts

It’s often difficult to start. Sometimes it’s easy, but other times it’s difficult. A start can come without expectations or it can be coupled with hope for a certain finish. Experience can make it easy, but it can also make it difficult. I think I’m at the worst place with starts. It’s difficult to start, it comes with expectations and my experience hinders me rather than saves me. My mind envisions all the paths to the hoped end, but they keep getting blocked. I’ve been down this road, I’ve been down that road. That’s what my mind does to my writing. The writing is blocked by cynicism and by fear. What is there to fear about writing? That’s a fair question. It differs from one person to another. I’ve heard about this fear from others but could never relate. Now I think I relate to the sentiment although I’m not certain that it is the same that others have. I fear my words will lead me down a tired path. The quest for something new is hindered by my experience. It’s not just experience. It’s exhaustion.

I would have loved to have been exhausted by writing itself. I would then just quit and find something else to do with my time. But really, I’m just exhausted with life. The futility of it all. The same old results. I had wished this tired old path led me to something fruitful, but it has not. It has lead me to a dead end and I need to figure things out before I am able to write again.

So I start again, in the hopes of evading some futility. Maybe I’m just accepting it. What did it all matter in the end? The lesson that I’ve learnt is that evil prevails. Good is just something that prevails in literature or motion pictures. I use the non-nuanced terms of good and evil because I’m too tired to make a sophisticated argument. The end result is that evil prevails. This isn’t a Paulo Cohelo thing nor its inversion. I know the world is more complex, but trauma is both simple and very complex. My intellect is able to understand and regurgitate that jargon that analyzes these sentiments, but my own emotions have been stripped down to a primal state, a state of feeling something that does not tolerate the sophistications of reality.

The whole point of expressing all this is purely therapeutic. Can I really express my state of mind? It’s all jumbled up, but this really does express it. It’s still not adequate, it is lacking. Is it abstract? Perhaps a little, but that’s how my mind works. If anything, it’s too simplified for what I’m thinking. I wonder how it sounds like to others. Is it clear or does it sound pretentious? I only ask because my thoughts have always been met with ‘But how do you really feel, concretely?’.. and this is how I’ve always thought of my feelings. Feelings are thoughts. These are my thoughts. These are my feelings.

I realize I have avoided starting anything, but then again, I’m almost finished.

It’s hard to make others understand, when you’ve questioned the accepted norms. This isn’t just some progressive crap though. I’ve questioned the conservative and the ‘progressive’. I’ve always thought something along the lines of ‘Progressives have a dogma that only conservatives have a dogma.’

I’ve used different building blocks for the structure of my thinking. It’s not that different. I too am trapped by my own context and my positionality. Still, starting from scratch is exhausting. Perhaps that’s why I’m unable to start.

Over the years I’ve come round full circle to where I was, writing about the inner thoughts. Yet the outside for me has changed so much. I’ve come to see the world through a lens tainted with blood and power. These are what shape my world. But I have never just been a simple observer. I’ve engaged. These two are countered by the power of people’s integrity. I’ve seen it up close. I shall never forget.