Therapeutic Thorns

My friend Larry reckons I have an issue. “Duh. Only one…?” I reply.

It arose again in our conversation just yesterday, part of a larger chain of synchronous events that has got me sitting up a little straighter, eyes a little wider, taking notice. As I write this, trying to get the essence of it down before my eyes glaze vapidly over once again, I recall also that my bride Natalie gave up seriously broaching the subject years ago, in frustration and perplexity.

“You’ve done it again!” she says more lightheartedly nowadays, using a favourite shtick to praise some blurb or socmed essay of hers I’ve tweaked into a jewel of precise expression for her business or studies.

“You have a gift,” it might then soberly continue, “You love to write – and you’re so good at it!” I feel a simultaneous rush of guilt at enjoying my ego being stroked and …something akin to shame and consternation at the truth being yet again outed.

I do so love to write.

But I don’t.

There.

I’ve written it.

As a child an avid reader of many genres, I clearly recognised even then the ability of words to light up my mind and explode in my imagination. Sensing the power of such a gift, I wanted to be an author and romantically penned hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages, spraying them down with the thoughts, images and adventures that lit my insides and kept me warm inside the pillow fort I was building in my head.

Although I wrote with the thought of eventually striking sparks in the minds of readers, the motivation for the words and the pleasure of putting them down on paper came from a deep place inside me. They were for me.

And yet, although there was never any formal stepping away from the desire to make this life about writing, I see now that somewhere along the way a fearful thought occurred. I told myself that the total commitment required for truly excellent and sustained expression reduced me to a simple choice: I could either live my own life, or I could write about imaginary lives. Not both.

I also got it in my head that I wasn’t content to “just write” – even though all the great writers advised, commanded, exhorted me to do just that. No, I placed further conditions upon myself, to justify I suppose now the pain of exile from something I loved. What I told myself was that, were I to ever actually become serious about it, I must not waste my time and talent tapping out frivolous “stories” and fictions.

No, for me to justify unlocking the entire arsenal of my verbal war chest I needed to be writing about, “something meaningful to me”. Thus it would require dire, international importance to ever allow myself to just do something that nature and nurture had collaborated to lay at my fingertips.

Looking back at it now, as I am forcing myself to do herein, something stands out very starkly as I frog-march myself through this dusty, little-used wing of my mind: that this is all pretty fucked up. Gothic novels and Marvel comics.

There’s an element of irony I’ve not mentioned yet. What got me nervously cracking my knuckles and now tapping on these keys has inadvertently turned out to be the elusive something-meaningful-to-me. The second aspect is the obvious therapeutic benefits of working this age-old writing nonsense out of my system, one word at a time.

But it was the first that got me to here, the “something meaningful”. And my “something meaningful” has turned out to be meaningless nothing.

Quite literally, “nothing” and quite literally “meaningless”.

Go figure.

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