Day 117.1: Slowing Down and Pain
Sep. 10th, 2024 08:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunshowerdandelionRushing has always been my greatest vice. That, and impatience. Especially with writing: If it doesn't burn, if it fails to catch on the first strike, then it is not worth thinking about. Writing to me is a usually painful process (at least at the start) where I flounder and flounder and fail to make the right words, and I really, really want to avoid that massive discomfort and pain. As a result the things I've written tend to have that rushed, headlong quality, which is perfect for some bits of writing (Reisen) but strange for others (Alice).
Also, this tendency is something that is very much exacerbated by work. The more time that I spend on work, the less time that I feel I have on writing. As a result I pressure myself to get the perfect first draft out, I am impatient, I push and push and don't settle in the painful process of word-trialing. I do not want to be in pain.
The pain is nervous, avoidant. I feel it as frustration, a want to clench my fists and push away from the table, a want to run away. I open internet tabs. I dissimulate. The pain stays but it is duller, and then I turn out subpar work, work that only glances away and will not stare, will not look. And then I have very, very inadequate tools to write what I see and sense. Writing for me is the process of witnessing and it is that which is very, very painful at two points: both the act of looking, and the act of transcribing.
Sometimes I exercise in an attempt to make that pain real. If I feel it while swimming, while walking, while cycling, doing stretches, then that is it. I do not have to go ahead with the writing.
But this must stop. I think I'll try to write earlier and earlier in the day, to immerse myself in that pain. I very much think that pain is the process of writing. I have to stay, I have to tell myself to stay, I have to feel that strange anomie for hours and hours. This is incidentally why I find editing so difficult: because it recalls that anomie, that raw nerve-pain, that is writing. I must write.
Also, this tendency is something that is very much exacerbated by work. The more time that I spend on work, the less time that I feel I have on writing. As a result I pressure myself to get the perfect first draft out, I am impatient, I push and push and don't settle in the painful process of word-trialing. I do not want to be in pain.
The pain is nervous, avoidant. I feel it as frustration, a want to clench my fists and push away from the table, a want to run away. I open internet tabs. I dissimulate. The pain stays but it is duller, and then I turn out subpar work, work that only glances away and will not stare, will not look. And then I have very, very inadequate tools to write what I see and sense. Writing for me is the process of witnessing and it is that which is very, very painful at two points: both the act of looking, and the act of transcribing.
Sometimes I exercise in an attempt to make that pain real. If I feel it while swimming, while walking, while cycling, doing stretches, then that is it. I do not have to go ahead with the writing.
But this must stop. I think I'll try to write earlier and earlier in the day, to immerse myself in that pain. I very much think that pain is the process of writing. I have to stay, I have to tell myself to stay, I have to feel that strange anomie for hours and hours. This is incidentally why I find editing so difficult: because it recalls that anomie, that raw nerve-pain, that is writing. I must write.
