Struggling with words

and struggling with myself

I don’t know if I’m just tired or trying too hard to say something meaningful but I am struggling to write. This post is a stream of consciousness type thing and I’m even having problems writing this — it has stretched over three days already.

At the beginning of 2014 I promised myself that I would write whatever came to me no matter what it was. I promised that I would not fall into the same old trap of seeking perfection, of trying to be clever or pithy. Still, time and again I fall foul of my own guidelines with each post trying to out do the last, trying to grow as a writer.

To grow means to develop, to get larger or more advanced. To grow means to expand or improve over time, to turn into an enhanced version of what existed before. But, at its core, to grow means to change.

For a writer, to grow means to get better at using words to convey meaning, emotion, ideas, to hold the attention, impart knowledge or inspire. All of this, however, ignores one important point:

To grow is to become

We spend our lives trying to become a better version of ourselves, a version that we can be proud of, an idealised version that we grow in to like an oversized jumper we are given as a child. One day, when we have grown, it will fit and we will be content.

A nice idea.

There is never a completely finished article, not until we breathe our last and can finally say “this is me, this is what I am” — the totality. Some know what they want to become but, for others, for me, there is no blueprint, no plan, only an overwhelming sense of “I don’t know what I should be doing, but I know it isn’t this.”

So I continue to grow, in myriad random ways — misshapen, an amorphous mass of experience, missteps and learning. Age is supposed to bring wisdom but, as I grow, the frustrating realisation is that each new me, each iteration, has inherited the same quirks, the same faults and keeps making the same mistakes. With time’s inexorable march it is as though I am a Russian doll constantly adding new layers but each is, at most, translucent with all those inside remaining visible, exerting an influence that would best be ignored and forgotten.

Without a true sense of direction, not knowing where I want to be, I can only wait to see what I become.