Live Life Like (The Captain of a Sinking Ship)

Writer’s block. Sure. I guess it’s a thing.  
Really, I only ever feel the delaying or procrastinating or straight up avoiding writing about, writing out, righting out the wrong.  
No. Not the wrongs. We can’t always right the wrongs. 
I’m talking about the feeling of wrongness that lies deep within the soul sometimes. For some folks anyways.  
I’ve always felt a darkness there. 

Depression. That is called depression my friends. 

But yeah, writer’s block. I wasn’t sure what to sit down and write tonight. And I’m writing while lying in bed. Laying in bed? Apparently spellcheck is telling me that “laying” is wrong. Thanks MS. I really needed something else double underlined saying “THIS IS WRONG RIGHT HERE FIX ME.” 

So, there I was, avoiding writing the elephant that has lost its colour. 

I decided to place that burden on my friends. I asked the interwebs, but also my close friends directly whether I should share an oldie from one of the many notebooks, or write this. Turns out, we’re going with a bit of both tonight thanks to one suggestion. (Thanks homie!!) 

Rather than simply transcribing an old project piece, I want to reflect on one of those. Actually, it was one of the most significant projects at that point in my life. Let’s welcome back 19-year-old me to the stage once again.  

[crickets] 

I had spent a pretty solid amount of time nearly completing a full composition notebook. I didn’t have many pages left before it disappeared. I think I’ve discussed that story previously (and if so, I’ll link it here later), so let us not discuss further.  

Instead, I want to look at what I had put into that notebook and what it all meant to me, now, some 15 years after I started that work. I spent quite a few college lectures scribbling away in that notebook rather than listening to Western Civ I and II. I had an extremely superficial and insignificant physical infatuation with the hot blonde that typically sat a few rows ahead of me in lecture. I don’t even know if she was actually blonde at this point anymore.  

One of those days, I decided to write a piece dedicated to the idea of her. Not to her, because, I had no idea who she was. I sought to breakdown and look into the idea of immortalization through literature and writing. I wish I remembered more of the stories and thoughts in that book, but I still hold firm to the belief it vanished under incredulous circumstances; seemed to coincide with receiving a replacement blank one a short time later. 

I lost an entire period of writing and thoughts and ideas. I’ve had a long lifetime of traumatic experiences and losses. Those writings came about in the early period of those experiences and before the heavy hitting, later rounds came abound. They came during a period of relative ease and happiness with a clear sense of self and direction. Then I started making choices that didn’t make sense and wouldn’t make sense outside of misguided logic and advice. Ending relationships, abandoning jobs, watching my support structure crumble.  

I look back at that period and have always let the rosiest of tint stain-glass my eyes. I see the happiness and forget the sadness. I see the sunshine of May and forget the blankets of December snow. I struggle to see that my anxiety and depression so severely impacted my life that I felt voiceless to the people I cared about most. I couldn’t tell anyone that I felt scared of my own potential and what I could truly become because it felt so god damn pretentious and egotistical. I ran from the positivity I found back to the darkness I had created and languished in for so long. It became such a massively transitional stage of my life as it grows farther in time and further in mind. It tested who I was against who I would become.  

I failed.  

But I did fight. 

God damn, did I fight.