Am I going to write another whiney piece about why I don’t write any more – don’t even want to write – to add to all the others I’ve written over the last year – or two – or however long it’s been? The endless, pointless quest to be understood and accepted – when, let’s face it, what does it matter, why should I expect anyone to understand or accept me, or even want to do so (except maybe my children – or my shrink, but then, that’s her job).
Why should it matter to me whether anyone understands me? I’m trying to understand myself, or explain myself, or accept myself, but why bother? Isn’t it all just inverted narcissism?
I get into conversations where I’m trying to explain but somehow what comes back from the other parties is not at all what I mean, yet I’m too slow witted to be able to argue back, and then I get frustrated at my own incompetence and inability to communicate and so angry with myself that I just have to let it all go. It doesn’t matter if nobody understands me, or they get a false idea or don’t listen to what I’m saying. I don’t need anybody else’s good opinion, but maybe I do need my own – and yet I know that really is a hopeless quest. After a lifetime of self-hate, how can there be any version of my future in which I could possibly find any pride and satisfaction in the things I’ve done? That is what I have to accept, that I’m incapable of having those feelings and there’s no future in trying to find them. So why waste my energy and time trying?
I’m not disappointed in my writing because I ever expected it to bring me money or fame (never been that naïve). ‘Write for yourself’ people say, but why should I do that if it doesn’t make me happy? All the words I’ve written have never resulted in me creating, completing, anything to be proud of. Maybe the odd poem (though I’m not writing them any more either) but no book that says what I want to say, or even comes close to a coherent, completed, narrative. Just the endless blog full of this same drivel, day after day, started because I thought that was the way to become a ‘writer’, and continued in the face of all evidence to the contrary. And in my heart I’ve learned to understand myself well enough to know that nothing I create will ever fill the great chasm inside me where love should be.
Where did that word spring from, the ‘L’ word? It just came as I was writing, as words do. I’m writing about writing, not about that. Is that my holy grail? It’s all part of the same thing, this great hole – I nearly wrote that as ‘whole’, very Freudian. Which reminds me of Peer Gynt – when you keep peeling the onion, in the end you have nothing. Just tears.