Spewings Forth, Vol. 1

I've had some difficulty taking the time needed to do some proper writing for a while and so I figured I'd take an opportunity to just do a little brain dumping. Just so that I'm not writing nothing. Which is precisely what I have been doing for months and months on end. It's funny that I want to be a writer but very infrequently do the thing that would warrant me adopting that title.

To be fair, I could write a lot. I could write a lot about the reasons why I haven't been writing. But I never wanted this site to be about the more difficult bits of life. I wanted it to be about fun things. Video games, books, music, etc.. But the problem is, you need to experience those things in order to write about them, and I haven't been.

If I was a normal person, I'd set aside time to do the things I enjoy. I'd come up with a schedule and strictly adhere to it. But for whatever reason, I can't seem to bring myself to do it. And then when the opportunity to do it passes, I feel like I wasted the time I had. And that makes me feel worse. And it's not that I'm replacing those things with productive things either. There is a lot of work that needs to be done on my house that I am also not doing.

The door handle on my front door broke months ago.The handle now doesn't open the door when you press it downward. But, if you pull it upwards, it still opens. So technically speaking, it still works. I don't have to fix it right now. Most normal people would have that fixed the day it broke. Or at the very least, the day after. But not me. I'll wait until the handle doesn't work at all. I'll wait until it's a crisis before I take any action. It's completely ridiculous. I realize it's ridiculous.

For whatever reason, I'm fighting back tears as I write this. Not because of the absurdity of not fixing a broken door handle. But rather because I know it's a deeper issue that causes me to be this way. It's not laziness. If I was a lazy person, I feel like it would show in other aspects of my life, like my job or in my responsibilities as a parent. But those are areas where I feel like I shine quite brightly.

It's something else. It's one of the many broken aspects of me. The part of me that feels like I can't do anything, until I have to. With things like household tasks, they eventually get resolved simply because eventually they have to. They reach that crisis point and I have no choice but to take action. But with things like video games and books, that never happens because it never reaches a point that I feel like I have to.

And so what ultimately ends up happening is that I never get a chance to do the things that I, at one time, loved to do.

I'd like this post to be a statement of triumph or resolve and say "I'm tired of being this way, so I'm going to change it right here and now!" But it's not going to be that. I don't think I have the wherewithal to back up a statement like that at this point. Even if it is true that I'm tired of being this way. I just feel like I don't have the energy.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. I don't want this newsletter to be a constant downer for the people who have subscribed to it. That's mainly the reason I haven't been writing. I honestly don't know what else to write about than the fact that I haven't been writing and the reasons behind it.

And I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel like a bit of a fraud. I've built friendships with people based on a shared love of writing. Friendships that I cherish but worry will lose value for them because I'm not doing the thing that led to them being established. The fact that I fear this happening says more about me than about them though. They're wonderful people and of course they're not going to see me as a less-valuable friend because of it. It's more to do with my own self-doubt.

Part of me knows that our value as people doesn't come from what we do and what we accomplish but rather from who we are and who we were made to be. It comes from how we treat others and how we love them and care for them. But it's hard to reconcile this knowledge with a hyper-capitalist culture that tells us the opposite. Or at least one that strongly insinuates it. It creates a sense of cognitive dissonance that puts my brain in a constant state of frenzy. And it feeds that other part of me that feels like a failure for not accomplishing more, not doing more.

The funny thing is that, as I write this, I feel like I'm fixing part of the problem. So maybe complaining about not doing the thing by doing the thing in order to complain about it is the thing I need to do more of? Haha.

I'm a mess, clearly. And I appreciate all of you who have stuck with me through everything. I promise I'll write about more happy things in the future. I just need to write about something to get the ball rolling. And I suppose this is certainly something!