The wells of fancy run dry

Writers do one thing. They write. They have seemingly endless depths of imagination and drive to tell stories. Their own and arguably the stories of others. It has been a long time since I actually wrote anything that wasn't a text message or much longer than an email. One can hardly call themselves a writer when one does not write. Which brings me to this blog.

At first it seemed I really did not know what this blog was for. I wrote about all matters and subjects. I posted recipes, fiction, personal entries and links to things I liked. It was a glorious experiment in writing almost for the sake of it and an alternative outlet while I was writing for my PhD. Importantly I also figured if I kept writing it gave me a reason to be and if I kept writing, kept putting it out there, I need not think quite as much about my mother's death and the gaping hole this left in my being. However, increasingly my blogging turned inwards focusing more and more on what this loss meant to me. Many of these posts I later removed. Were they too personal? Perhaps. My worry increasingly became that they revealed a portrait of a flawed and mangled human being. A narcissist, stuck in the depths of self pity and loathing.

Somehow during this time this kind of writing got wrapped up in my writing of my PhD and indeed the writing of my own life. My ability to create a forward narrative and tell a story about me that was somehow different than the depths of grief I felt became deeply compromised. Once this had occurred and somehow infected me and the world around me, I sought to recreate this terrible narrative in all the world around me, because in the depths of me it was all that I knew.

It destroyed relationships and a career path into academia. I also became deeply angry about this: my feeling of being incapable to change anything, my self destructive bent, alongside the event that had such impact that it threatened to destroy my life. Unfortunately it spiraled, with one thing feeding off another. Self loathing about oneself begets more self loathing. Anger about one's actions creates only more anger. Bitterness leads only to more bitterness. It is with only a fraction more clarity that I now write this, as it was also terribly difficult to see what I was doing and indeed even make any real assessment of where I am today compared to the past five and a bit years.

In short since 2003 I have lost hope. A glimmer of hope is a precious and fragile thing. I have also realized what a necessity hope is to both write and to live. One cannot write stories that tell of escape, success, holding on, fighting for one's life without hope. And one cannot live particularly well without hope either.

After finishing the PhD a glimmer of hope emerged that my life might be different, I might have some kind of success because of actually finishing was some kind of small success. And having a little success does tend to create more success. Unfortunately this was not and has not been the case. Perhaps it is because I am a flawed human being? Perhaps it was just a simple case of not having any support to launch a career? Perhaps it was more a case of there simply not being any academic jobs? Perhaps it was a case of me no longer wanting it enough and giving up trying? Perhaps it is just a simple case of people being so wrapped up in their own lives that why should they care about someone who had nothing to offer them? But perhaps it is more to do with hope being in very short supply.

After a while I stopped writing anything personal here. My fears of what it might reveal was initially what I thought stopped this. Then I just stopped writing. A writer must write and I found myself post-PhD with nothing to say. Nothing I wanted to say. Nothing I cared about anymore with any real passion. Possibly because caring about something would only lead to disappointment. Much like my PhD experience. Maybe because I came to see being passionate about something only leading to undue stress and ultimately disappointment.

During this time away from writing I sculpted, I painted and I drew. Engaged different creative energies, but I ceased to write. The wells of fancy had well and truly run dry. Once again this brings me back to this blog. I have not know what to do with it for some time. It seems a record of a period of my life that while I'd rather not look at closely and as often now I find myself unable to hit the delete button and remove it from the web. And there are some who would undoubtedly sigh with relief if I did this. So like all stories they are never finished, merely abandoned.