the importance of being fun;

writing this from the mindset of defeat --

 

to begin this epic blog adventure, i had drafted this whole spiel about beginnings and endings months ago, about how i fail greatly at the latter (ending things) and succeed with flying colors at the former (beginning things), and there’s something about endurance and also, something deep. 

 

alas, that original blog post draft is now enslaved by weebly, because i have forgotten the password to weebly, and that account is tied to an email address that i can no longer get into because the password to that email was saved on my phone notes and my phone is defunct, so i can’t access said password, which means i can’t access the email, which means i can’t do a Forgot password with weebly...

 

so scratch that. 

 

i’m writing this from the mindset of defeat, thinking, how does one dig one’s self out of the pit of utter defeat that one has dug for one’s self that begun with finding out that the last agent she has queried has passed on her (without so much as a rejection email and with the lingering bitterness from said agent’s words stating “expect (…) WHERE DUE, a positive request for additional materials”; “WHERE DUE”: translation (or possible mistranslation): "if you’ve deserved it”; we’re here without request for additional materials, ergo, it must mean i did not deserve anything)? 

 

i decided to dig a greater pit, unconsciously, by procrastinating by way of social media, with which i have a love/hate relationship, on the evening i should be on Tech Shabbat (great practice, one i rarely fail at, except today, clearly), and this pit has gone deeper as the hours went by and i’ve realized, like most procrastinators, that the Thing i wanted to do is still waiting for me while i just wasted hours seeking a false high, and now i feel awful for wasting all those hours i could’ve been doing something productive, and i’ve added salt to the wound by putting on a really depressing song on the background¹ on repeat while i try to get to the Thing i was procrastinating on, only to be distracted again with writing a blog about my mindset of utter defeat that’s keeping me from the Thing, the Thing being writing. 

 

i forgot, i think, what it feels like to just write. 

 

i forgot the joy of writing. 

 

i forgot the joy of being organic in my thoughts and writing.

 

i forgot the joy in not editing and just thinking out loud; less Hemingway, more Kerouac. 

 

i forgot…joy, i guess. and to quote out-of-context that depressing song currently on repeat, “i guess we lost our focus”. 

 

when did writing become a chore to procrastinate from? when did it become this heavy load i’ve buried in the back of my mind? the very act of creating is an act of life, and here i am, a metaphorical writer zombie who calls herself, though only in her head, a writer, yet i don’t actually WRITE. i’m almost terrified of it. 

 

terrified at the commitment and the cost and the hours and the digging deep into my internal well, and, man, even the joy. i think i’m terrified of enjoying WRITING. because then, you gotta keep doing it, and you gotta commit more, and it’ll take more out of you, and maybe, just maybe, you might find out something about yourself you don’t like, and then you’d have to change, and then you’d have to give up even more…

 

this human thing is hard.

 

when speechless, i turn to david foster wallace’s words:

 
“In the beginning, when you first start out trying to write fiction, the whole endeavor’s about fun. You don’t expect anybody else to read it. You’re writing almost wholly to get yourself off. To enable your own fantasies and deviant logics and to escape or transform parts of yourself you don’t like. And it works – and it’s terrific fun. Then, if you have good luck and people seem to like what you do, and you actually start to get paid for it, and get to see your stuff professionally typeset and bound and blurbed and reviewed and even (once) being read on the a.m. subway by a pretty girl you don’t even know it seems to make it even more fun. For a while.”²

 

question is: how can i get to the part that happens after “for a while”--the depressing part where writing stops being fun--when i can’t even get to the part where it IS fun? 

 

so i guess the thesis of this blog is fun. joy. organic posts. nothing calculating. nothing planned. here, you’ll get a whole gamut of randomness, because i’ve been thinking, someone is not just One Thing. and to box people into categories, for aesthetic’s sake, e.g. my brand is only about poetry so i’m sticking to talking about poetry, is, like, self-crushing. plus, staying in one box is boring. one of my favourite animals is the platypus — it’s like God couldn’t make up His mind on which box to place the platypus in (duck? beaver? otter?), so He decided to check all the boxes.

 

i, too, will check all the boxes. imago dei, and such. like David F.W. promised to his agent once: “I will be a fiction writer again or die trying.” i will have fun with writing again, or die trying. 

 

to round it off with a quote from the song currently on repeat--maybe, just maybe--“it’ll be all right."

 

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¹ “Still” by Niall Horan

² “The Nature of Fun” by David Foster Wallace