There is pressure from people: some who want me to prove myself for its own sake and some who want me to prove something to them. Overall, my feelings and thoughts about it are quite level: it’s simple enough—I know my capabilities and I know my limits and I’m aware how they fluctuate. Trying to articulate that has been my focus for a long while and fiction writing has taken a backseat because of that. There isn’t any method or rig-up involved only that I feel more creative when I’m either relaxed or focused. Both together is great but that combination is something that is hardly ever attainable anymore.
These days I create when I’m feeling focused enough. I have to push through to reach that creativity. Sometimes lately, I’ve been trying to focus raw energy into artwork to avoid succumbing to emotional turmoil. It helps refocus emotion into something productive the way that journaling helps me to refocus my thoughts long enough to make sense of them or put them to rest.
It’s interesting that even here in private meditation of sorts, I’m fighting against external influences. Those which say ‘enough’ when I’m barely done (or half begun). Those which try to censor me, tell me to ‘be quiet’ when the methods I’ve chosen to harness this energy is quiet and safe enough and the alternative, tested by force as it was, simply isn’t. I’m learning to ignore the voices of those around me. They really aren’t my own. I think early on this is how I knew I was being gaslighted because writing has been a mainstay in my life for so long. No manifestation of mine would ever have deterred me from my anchor the way I was deterred by others.
People who want to help, overlook how important it is for me to get MY story on the page. I can’t do it with any input of any kind. I refuse to. I write in bursts these days because of it. Sometimes it’s left until I’m on the brink because it ensures that I’m listening to myself when I finally put down words.
Sometimes, I think it’s a bit like a prophecy belonging to someone else. Someone who wants me to feel either undermined in my achievement or deterred altogether. I reject both. I’ve been making progress anyway and there’s some satisfaction in that. The frustration that something (not just writing but life and parenting, too) that is altogether difficult enough as it is, is made harder by those who want their prophecy fulfilled, threatens my peace and my resolve. Sometimes it wins. Other times, I do.
It’s easy enough to see where it stems from and from whom. It’s also easy enough to recognise that links can be made without there being malicious intent at the root. There is also acknowledgement to be given where there is. Both can be true. Both can exist. One can cover the other.
What is important now is being aware of it, observing it, trying to not lose myself in the making sense of it and not applying meaning to it where I shouldn’t. That’s easy enough to say. In practice, it is difficult to hold these things at the same time. The most pressing part for me is acknowledging how unjust humans can be, and the pressing part is then: who am I? Am I like them? Really? My thoughts might be impulsive but I am usually not. Slowing my thoughts and reflecting on these thoughts might be uncomfortable to do and to witness but it’s necessary. The thoughts which still pose an issue for me are not always my own thoughts but projections. Societal stances. Echoes of interactions. Public opinion. My own follow afterward. The exceptions are when I’ve already worked through the residue. Or where I’m already passionate about something enough that my mind is already clear and made up in its own right.
These things have created confusion. My confusion came afterwards as I realised how these things were being interpreted as characteristic. Others’ confusion came as a result of how at odds these things were with who I am. Naturally—because it’s not one and the same.
This has been borne of a lifetime’s worth of listening.
That my character is actually at odds with what turns over in my mind at first is a credit to how much I think before forming my own opinion. For the times in the past where I wasn’t given time to think, there it is: you got what you gave—or what was previously given.
