Write Through It.

Today is a terrible day. I'm starting to think this might have been a bad time to start a blog.

I am not going to go into details right now about why today is a terrible day; I'll write on it in a future post.

Instead, to avoid having too many sad posts in a row, today I will write about writing.

I'm not a particular fan of using writing as therapy, at least, not in my own life. Whenever I'd start a journal, for instance, I'd fall into this pattern of only writing whenever I was feeling unhappy. This was not good, especially when I considered the possibility of future generations finding my journal and deciding great-grandma was a super-bitchy and miserable human being.

And when I write, I usually use the activity to escape or avoid whatever might be bothering me at that moment. For instance, when I got rejected from PhD programs a few years ago, I managed to completely revamp and rewrite a novel I had been working on for almost three years. And it wasn't a short one. I think I pumped out something like two-hundred pages in a couple months. But when it came to what I should have been writing (as in, final seminar papers), I could barely eke out fifteen pages, let alone several dozen.

However, there have been a few occasions where I have "written through it," so to speak.

Most recently (and probably most pathetically), this past summer I wrote a sprawling-drunken rant in a tiny Moleskine notebook on my fears about the future. I haven't actually gone back to read it; maybe I should since it will remind me why I should never drink-and-write again. But in that instance, words just came out in ink form without any effort (or thought...) whatsoever.

Less pathetic: I also wrote a few words for my grandfather's funeral. I didn't particularly want to, mainly because I was so saddened by his death, and didn't think I could pull a coherent sentence together, but my mother suggested that I write something, so I did. I cried the entire time I was typing, and I couldn't finish reading it aloud at the funeral, but I wrote.

I've read a lot of stuff by writers who bemoan the writing process as being painful. They're usually writing about things like getting a draft finished, or coming up with ideas, or meeting deadlines or something. And they're right. That stuff is tough, for sure. But I find writing about life pretty fucking difficult. I'd rather put on the television and not do or feel anything at all.

The thing is, I don't think that being a writer is a particularly comfortable job. If you are a good writer, you can't "move on" the way other people do because you have to write about it first. You have to think about why you are thinking those thoughts, and why you are feeling those emotions. You have to consider how these things affect who you are as a person. You have to dwell on the past. You have to remember the painful memories, as well as the good memories that sometimes become painful in retrospect.

So even though today is a terrible day, I chose to write anyway. And even though tomorrow will be just as sad, I'll choose to write through it again.