Surprisingly, I Have a Complicated Relationship with Writing

A digital overload consumes me as I desperately chase the elusive promise of Inbox Zero

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Breathe —

Breathebreathebreathebreathebreathe

Everything is spinning. I listen to the passing of time. Nothing happens. The rush of seconds and minutes drags me toward nothingness. And what does it mean when we say time passes? Is it possible to experience time passing? But I will leave the questions about the passage of time to metaphysics because words measure my time.

“How long is forever?” inquires Alice.

“Sometimes, just one second,” responds the White Rabbit.

If I stop and do nothing, nothing happens. Suppose I am thinking about nothing. I listen to the passing of time.

I have a complicated relationship with writing. Sometimes, I even distrust writing. It gives sententious pronouncements, makes moral judgments, describes purported historical facts, or tells exciting stories.

Charting the courses taken by the great, my words follow frozen minds into the vast, dark terra incognita of the past, and unconsciously, I build upon a palimpsest of books written long ago and built upon an essence of meaning that could not be lost, no matter how much time had passed.

It is time to allow the words’ continuing trajectories to trace paths in my novel to simulate the next thought. To continue accelerating toward the point of no return. To allow ways of every charged word, every strange and charming idea, to be captured and cast in crystalline patterns. Let these words be frozen forever in that moment of separation from me.

Yet, a digital overload consumes me as I desperately chase the elusive promise of Inbox Zero.

My time dominated by answering emails and reciprocating on Medium is eating up my novel-writing time.

My phone and computer should be sequestered in darkness. I have been slacking, spending time on reading and responding — one rabbit hole leading into another, into further nothingness. There are so many stories to read from great writers. The reciprocal responses and reads, known as the Law of Reciprocity, are overwhelming.

You know the feeling. You have barely responded to one message when another comes in. Then, two more. Your phone is buzzing as if possessed, your unread message count is soaring — and there is no end in sight.

TIME!

Each “yes” leads to more work. Saying no is a challenge: You do not want to disappoint people, but time has lost its solidity in that arid, airless brain haunted by faint electronic noises and the smells of dissolution.

That is why Homa is stuck in chapter 47 of Blind Pursuit, caught by her grief — the recent suicide of a friend.

Two days ago, I finally finished chapters 45 and 46. After a month of putting my book aside, I should be excited. Instead, the ending I envisioned many chapters ago has become elusive after the changes I made to my characters — sticking my earnest face, watching characters I have no business watching.

So, I am sitting at my desk, trying to finish chapter 47 with no end in sight. The elusive ending makes me feel hollow. Time drags. The hollowness grows, slowly swallowing me whole, digesting me.

I read somewhere that the writer must be true to the truth. The static text passed down through the ages ensures they remain true and refine them for the future.

But words that should cut through the air like flaming arrows pulled out of my head, one after the other at lightning speed, move at a sclerotic pace. I am a sleepwalker, hypnotized — slowly wading through a muddy pond — the thin margin between energized writing and the death of time.

And then I try to remember a moment. To see that moment perfectly in my mind, transfer it to the page. It is just that I feel and hear the world so intensely that words puzzle me. The sight of a child crying or the unhappy silence between a couple at a restaurant settles deep within me. The sound of a car horn a block away startles me and leaves me shaking. A sad scene on TV causes tears to run down my face. The words are there. I only need to put pen to paper.

I am strung out and so tired of feeling too much until it becomes easier not to feel at all. If only I could — synchronize things that typically exist separately, as is rhythm in music. The road to get there advances like a saga.

Like a whisper that stirs to life, like a thing coming awake after a heavy sleep. If I could only control my wayward mind, choosing what I want to focus on with military precision. Maybe then the sentences will not be coming out as heavy fragments.

Time with its rhythm; it goes slowly or rapidly.

The rush of seconds, hours, and years that flings us towards life then tows us towards nothingness. We dwell in time as fish live in water. Our existence is in time. Its sober music sustains us, opens the world, troubles us, frightens and soothes us. The universe advances into the future, is pulled by time, and exists according to the order of time.

What drives my endless hours of writing or thinking about writing is the joy and the misery of writing. Every thought and every word works for me or against me.

Every word glows in the cold, shifting, joining, and breaking. They leave in my wake spiraling phosphorescent paths, each as distinctive as a signature, as they push and rise toward an unseen surface.

Back to Stolen Truth.

Now, go and seize the day!