It’s easier writing to someone. All my life I’ve wanted to be a writer and now I’m turning a new thought over in my head: I merely want to be read. Not by everyone. By one person. By the right eyes and right mind.
I read my diaries from five years ago and realize nothing has changed. I think the same thoughts yet somehow I’m an entirely different person. Yet somehow I’m not.
My self-awareness only gets me so far.
I understand one thing about myself and tangle myself in a hundred other dilemmas.
Perhaps there are too many variables to the human self. There’s too much that happened. All the variables are not stored neatly in columns. My mind is not an excel spreadsheet.
Five years go by so fast once you’re an adult. Scarcity starts clogging your brain. Scarcity is it? Or is it being realistic? Or is it settling? I think to myself if only one person read my writing that would be enough for me.
Is that a loss of ambition or is it freeing oneself out of performance? I love books but bookstores and libraries scare me sometimes. I look for the book I spent two years writing and never published. I see stacks and columns of books, old and new. I think about pages. How many pages in a book? How many lines on a page? How many words in a line?
You think about the vastness of a library. How one singular book would completely vanish among the greats. That’s a visual representation we can comprehend and see. Then you think about the internet and how this writing exists in one of its many tiny corners. My words are what, binary bits now?
Everything is nothing.
I’m not sure why humans have this tendency to leave their mark in the world, to leave behind a legacy. You think about how many people wanted to impact the world with the work they do best, with what they’re passionate about and how many actually end up doing so.
I have this perhaps silly delusion that my words are special and that they’re important enough to be written down. The world wouldn’t be any different with or without them, in reality. Perhaps writing for me is a means to self-soothe and that’s it. I have nothing to offer the reader.
Nothing but honesty.
I wish my empathy didn’t make me a dishonest, secretive person. I wish the truth could sit on my tongue instead of running off. I wish I could say the truth even if I hurt another person’s feelings with it.
Then I think of hurt. I think of tears and swollen eyes.
I have to remind myself of the nuances of morality.
I have to remind myself to be human is to err.
I’ve been trying to avoid error all my life and I have to. I have to because I for so long believed people who hurt people could’ve easily avoided it. Sometimes you can, other times you can not.
You will make mistakes. And you will forgive others for theirs.
You will do the honest difficult thing.
I will write if there are zero people reading. If my words are lost when the stars collapse and everything turns to rubble one day.
All my diaries will all be gone one day.
An entire human existence diminished to nothing.
Somehow I can only write from the heart when it’s in some capacity swollen and shriveled up like a prune if not broken.
That’s why people are so important to me. Important. Yet it is so difficult to be honest to others if you can not be honest to yourself. If you’re so scared of hurting your own feelings, of admitting to yourself, taking accountability. Eventually you gobble down the truth like I once did a ghost pepper. I did it for a fundraising event but the truth you swallow whole in private. It burns your eyes. You feel like you’ll die and after hours and some milk you’re fine. But that ghost pepper rots in your stomach undigested.
I had to vomit it out later.
You have to vomit it out later.
Love,
Metacog Moon 