Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Goddammit.

I am not, in the strictest sense of the word, a writer.

Oh, I'm perfectly capable of using words to express myself - sometimes. An ongoing theme I've noticed in my life is that the English language (or any other, really) doesn't always have enough words to accurately describe my feelings or anything else. There are close approximations, but often, nothing exact. It's one of the reasons I didn't have many friends in grade school and high school. I did have one, and the reason he and I stayed friends was because we both came to that same realization, and also realized that when we were talking, it didn't matter, because we got a lot of the same non-verbal cues.

So he made me a little bit lazy with expressing myself. Why bother going through the effort when he was going to get it anyway? And he made me reluctant to ever try to be different.

The written word is still easier than the spoken word. Spoken word requires me to think on my feet, and come up with things quickly. Writing allows me to let it sit for as long as it needs to before coming out. Doesn't stop me from speaking so quickly I stumble over my words - then again, I don't usually talk about heady things like emotions.

Jay's continued to call me at night, and while I love the feeling of connectedness these calls give me, I hate the actual work of communicating and connecting they require. He's turning the tables and trying to pick my brain apart - I've been trying to pick his for years. It's not that I don't know the answers; I spend hours upon hours picking my own brain and putting everything into its place. It's that I can't figure out a way that I like to tell him the answers.

Some of it is fear that he won't like what he hears. Some of it is perfectionism rearing its ugly head. Some of it is a lack of vocabulary and a tired head.

Some of it us me putting off what I really want to do, by talking about why I don't want to do what I want to do. Hopefully, at some point, that sentence will make sense, because I'll get around to doing what it is I want to do.

1 comment:

Lenora said...

I find the same difficulty, often. D/s and related topics often engage a wealth of feelings that our thought processes (and thus, the language) can't adequately draw that bright line around and communicate to others in coherent units. I think that this phenomenon is largely responsible for a lot of rambling entries one sees in blogs; one hopes that running up to the point from various angles results in a more or less complete picture in the end.

The most effective strategy, I find, is to acknowledge the difficulty but at the same time forge ahead and get it down in words. In most cases one ends up getting across perhaps 80% of what one really feels. And that's not bad. The biggest hurdle (and you alluded to this in your post) is being OK with 80% (or more).

All the best to you.

--L.