The happier I am, the less I want to write.
Thats sad, isn’t it?
When I was >10 years old, it was quite the opposite. I wrote stories about a recurring cast of characters featuring Stara, Princess of the Stars – and I wrote out of a place of enormous joy. I wrote and illustrated a series of projective autobiographies, most of which featured me winning an Emmy before I knew what an Emmy was – and again I was tragically optimistic and happy.
Perhaps it was a learned behavior transition, but in my early adolescence writing became much more about working through the issue du jour. But at least I stayed in comedic genre – creating a series of comic strips about the Yap Yap family (I made no attempt to veil their true identities). Finally, probably after “goth” was in and before “emo” was a word, I became one of those, kids. The ones that let their guts spill out in diaries that they hid under their bed and who only record all the misadventures of their tremblingly hormonal life. I hope I’m not there anymore, but who knows…
Since I’ve been at college the impulse to creative write or journal has ebbed and flowed with the tides of fortune and misfortune. As I said before, the happier I am, the less I want to write. In a lot of ways this class and particularly the blogging assignment has sent a breath of fresh air through the writer corner of my brain; for most of this quarter I have looked forward to writing “whatever’s on my mind,” to paraphrase the instructions we were given.
I don’t think I’ve been particularly dower this winter (hey, its been pretty warm), but in the last week or so an increasing sense of fun in my life has really made it difficult to want to blog, even if the topic is perscribed or easy to formulate. I know this seems problematic, and I would blame no one for concluding that “if I were a true writer, I wouldn’t have so many mood contingencies to write (or so many spelling and punctuation errors!)” I enormously enjoy the consumption and production of the written word but I am not married to the idea of being a writer – at least not in the identity sub-heading sort of way. If my happiness means I would never write again… well I would probably want just a little misery, but not much.
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