The Writer's Paradox

The ultimate paradox as a writer: the world keeps spinning, life continues to happen, synchronicities and patterns and events that must be noticed, should be documented, potentially highly meaningful connections that could have been made, symbolic interactions that MUST be made but aren't -- none of it stops. But you must, if you're going to write. If you have a "writer's mind" (or perhaps one of an artist, in general), you notice everything. You're aware. You're awake. And so this is torture, knowing that these things, this world, these connections going on outside of you that would infuse your insides are all going on without you because instead of living those connections, you're sitting somewhere putting words to page. Words that are, by now, past their expiration date due to the fact that the experience they tell of is in the past.

But maybe this is the way to turn things off. A breath. Ah.

I used to write in the middle of the night when the world was quieter and the absence of activity around me brought clarity of thought, and words felt more accessible because everything had slowed down. 2 ... 3 ... 4 in the morning. Sleep could wait. But things are different now. I trade sleep for the possible perfectly penned (and) abstract allegory, the line that brings me to laugh at the thought of how brilliant it is. Sleep feels more important.

"You can sleep when you're dead" is the dumbest fucking quote I've ever heard. Don't say that shit to me until you're a sleep-deprived asshole snapping at the people closest to you, lugging around bags under your eyes [and as a woman this matters more because somehow, still, on the physical plane people care way too goddamn much about how women look; it defines us & can be the difference between getting a job or not, getting the guy or not], severing relationships with your serpent tongue that didn't get its full night of rest, its honey reprieve, didn't get its sweet humming lullaby of bees bringing nectar to dreams. Don't say that shit to me until you're that person and you feel okay about yourself. The people spliced like sentences-that-weren't are also the people who might hold me as I cry, racking sobs, about how the world is burning and I can't do shit about it. How my world is burning and the fire won't go out. The drought is here, and it's real. I need those people. And they might need me, sans serpent tongue.

The thing is, trading sleep for my would-be-story-put-to-paper, for carefully crafted lines, for my penchant for penned perfection is what's making me that person. Maybe through writing I could do something about the whole world-is-burning thing -- and that knowing is heavy. That weighs more than the bags I'm somehow still lugging anyway, sleep or no sleep.

And it doesn't feel okay.


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