Cloistered Thoughts

Reflections on motivating myself to write

I came to Tumblr from Posterous because the latter shut down. I didn’t like Tumblr at all when I first came here, because I found it difficult to get my bearings. I came back and flourished.

Years later, I certainly write very little of a personal nature because the longer I spent here, the more people who knew me in real life started reading. It’d be one thing if it were people I didn’t talk to often, but eventually loves and past loves and a bunch of other randos started checking out what I had to say and I retreated further to the margins of the page.

There’s a kind of sanctity in silence, sometimes. I heard a comedian once joke, “isn’t it a shame that he died?” talking about another comedian. “Don’t you just wonder about all the good material he was working on that’s now lost?”

It’s a funny thing, thinking about what we say and don’t say. Sometimes, I am preoccupied with making sure I don’t leave anything unsaid. My life — more in the early years than now — was full of premature endings. My younger brother died before he was 4, my maternal grandparents of whom I was closest died before I was out of high school within a year of each other and eventually, my parents marriage finally ended.

It’s still jarring in a way for me to accept how different everything is. Don’t get me wrong, I do it willingly. It’s just a bit weird sometimes for me to reflect on how much has changed and to make sense of my place in all of that. It’s not surprising then, I find myself at a weird crossroads where work and independence seem at opposite ends of the planet and not able to figure out where I’m supposed to fit.

None of these are unique problems. I know because I talk to many of my friends and others who go through all sorts of issues all of the time. It’s always a reminder that the way I’ve curated my life isn’t necessarily as bad as I like to think it is sometimes, but it’s also a reminder there’s a time limit on all of this, but unlike a sporting event, you don’t quite know when it’ll be over.

I think coming of age movies resonate with me so much, because I relate so much to the idea of not knowing. I try to avoid thinking too much about the missteps that get me to where I am, because it’s overwhelming and not especially productive. I also try not to think too hard about atonement and what specific sins deserve a kind of penance versus other ones. I just want to find a consistent kind of satisfaction, not happiness. Just the routine of a day to day where I feel okay with where things are.

Maybe that’s not how I’m wired. I think it’s less that and more about seeing the game how it’s played and trying to figure out how to position myself to be in a place to reap the sort of benefits I need to pursue the life I want for myself. My current and lasting fear is running out of time or not making it to that point. Disappointment is a bummer, but I think there is also just a real fear of missing out period on the stuff that other people get to experience — though I can say there are some things I’m good with not having — I can’t help but feel a lingering sense of bitterness over not having stuff align how I wanted it to.

On the flip side, I spend a lot of time being pretty pleased with where I ended up. I don’t know if you told me all I’ve seen and managed to do up to this point, that I’d have believed you at similar down points in the past. There’s just no way I could’ve expected to have emerged from the depths of life at different times, yet here I am.

I stopped writing stuff like this, because I felt weird about it. At a certain point, I felt like a teenager writing in a livejournal to my few dozen friends and I think about folks with real lives and jobs and stuff and feels decadent to be doing all of this navel gazing. Yet, it’s how I work out problems and come up with a direction. I can’t promise there will be more here, but I’m going to try to take this opportunity to speak up more.

The proliferation of media outlets with our frame of reference (Gen x/y types) makes me raise my voice more, because I feel like I relate and yet, there’s still more to say. I see lots of situations where I should chime in, write a post, reflect or respond to a real-life thing and I usually don’t. I’m working on that, though. I don’t know — or care — if it leads to anything, I just feel like I went from speaking up a lot to not saying very much. Or at least, when I do talk now, it can be scattered and random.

I’m loathe to be judged by people who don’t understand the journey, but maybe I’ve reached the point where I don’t care anymore whether people judge or what they think.

We’ll see.