??? · 7:25am May 23rd, 2015
It's a few minutes after 2 AM as I'm typing this, and for the last hour and a half, I've been sitting here listening to Kamelot's new album on repeat-ish, staring at a word processor as I desperately search for the words to express a feeling I've become intimately familiar with over the last few years. Since I sat down to begin writing ninety minutes ago, I've added about a hundred words to a short vignette I decided to write last night on a whim, when I realized I wanted to follow along with a trend among a few friends of mine in a Skype chat, and now I can't help but wonder how my life became so difficult without my realizing it.
Back up about twenty-seven hours, and you'll find me and everyone else active in that Skype chat at the time in a conversation about which Pokémon best represents each of us. Some of us chose the obvious, while others settled on ones that made sense primarily to them. I chose Lucario, largely because I've favored that Pokémon for a long time. Sometimes, I come across a fictional species that I feel a sort of connection to, from dragons to werewolves to (briefly) ponies. Maybe that says something about me, I don't really know. All I do know is that for years, I've been creating fantastical, nonhuman versions of myself in the privacy of my own mind.
In any case, some of those friends started to draw themselves as that Pokémon, and given my tendency to recreate myself ad infinitum, I wanted to join in. However, I'm not an artist. I haven't wanted to be an artist for a long time; the last time I put any significant effort into drawing anything was years ago. That pursuit fell by the wayside as I discovered my gift with words, and chose to focus my attention on writing rather than a more visual medium. So, last night, I set out to write about a Lucario I could have been in a different world and a different life. I wanted to paint a simple portrait with words; I wasn't planning for this to go past three or four pages in Google Docs at the very most. But that hasn't been an issue, it turns out.
The five hundred words I have written are some of the hardest I've ever had to force out, and I know damn well this says something about me.
If there's one thing I take pride in, it's my skill in writing. I don't care how unpolished, sporadic, or unrefined that skill may be, it's there and it's significant. So for me to completely grind myself to a halt by simply putting myself on the page rather than a fragment of my imagination...
It scares me.
Seems like an intense writing exercise, that's for sure man.