Repression, anxiety, and that block between my mind and my words..

I’ve been keeping things from you again. I’ve been holding back. Not every detail of my life makes it into this blog, makes it onto Modern Evil. Not even every anxiety-inducing, stressful, complicated, shouting, mindless event seems to qualify. Not every moment of happiness… though most do.

I don’t think I’m going to be able to go back and remember everything I never said, so … you’re just going to have to do without… Well, until/unless someday I get nostalgic about the things I didn’t say and re-tell them the way I remember them… and then you still probably won’t be getting the truth, due to the fallibility of memory. And I don’t know if I’ll be able to force myself to post about everything going forward, either. Just have to wait and see, I guess.

It isn’t about an idealized version of anything. For the most part it’s been about … discretion … and not wanting to go back over and over stupidly difficult events.

. . .

I’m not doing so well lately. Coming and going… but mostly heading down. The idea of getting a job I hate depresses me. The idea of selling this property has always uspet me, even when I was a kid and it was just the long-off notion that someday my grandparents would die and then someday even later my father would die, and if it hadn’t already sold it would have to be sold to split its value up among my siblings and I… I always wanted to live here. I suppose I got my chance. Got a year and a half. But now I’ve got to move back to Phoenix. And after not very long, this property won’t be in the family any longer. And I’ll either be working a job I can’t stand or working a job I can appreciate, but neither will be doing what I want to be doing for a living. And that’s not a happy thought.

Sleeping late… sometimes, but not always, with the corresponding staying-up-late… not eating properly…

. . .

I think I’ll try writing again. Maybe if I try writing I’ll get an idea for this canvas I’ve had waiting on my table for the last few days. On the other hand, maybe I’ll actually get some writing done. I recently recalled yet another idea for a novel I’ve got waiting for me to get to it. Since I know I can write a novel in a month, a novel in a week, in fact, since I know I can get to the end of a novel at all, I don’t know what’s stopping me from just churning out books as fast as the ideas come to me.

Some sort of over-developed sense of procrastination? Mental residue from the decades of my life in which my parents simultaneously taught me that creativity should be cherished and that one could never succeed being creative and shouldn’t even try? Some standard sort of writer’s block?

Bah.

And are the same forces keeping me from painting?

Perhaps this is the month in which I shall begin collecting entries from Modern Evil into printed volumes. That would be mind-numbing OR heart wrenching, one, then then other in cycle as I go from one entry to the next. Which will this be?