Hard to Say
Archived from Dec 09, 2024:
I don’t remember the first book I ever read. It could be any of many - I am laden with memories of Red Wall, Agatha Christie and How to Train Your Dragon. I remember the Windsor Park library, or the one across from the St. Vital YMCA, accessible from an out of place underground tunnel. I remember school libraries, scholastic book fairs, books at home and the Stephen King heavy cabin shelf that carried my (probably too young) self through several summers.
My current home is a mess with piles of books, slowly and constantly outgrowing the bookshelves I have, the stacks growing in time with my pothos plants. The collection has grown over homes and years, some books being dragged across the country - each a whole world it feels impossible to leave behind. I love reading, sometimes life is too busy to get much done but I always come back to the solace of throwing myself into something outside myself. So many books are wonderful but every so often one is enough to mold your soul, changing it word by word, moment by moment. You have to read a lot to find the books that do this because not only are they rare but you must know yourself and your likes - the reader makes the book, and the book only has as much power as a reader has vulnerability. I want to be stopped in my tracks with beauty and devastation, I want to push myself to keep reading through shaking sobs and damp cheeks, I want my heart pulled out of my chest and examined by the words of one I will never meet. I want to be the kind person this is possible for. I love reading.
I don’t love writing. I sit here with a coffee, sun finally breaking through the clouds after several gloomy Toronto days in a row and I type away on a pink keyboard with a satisfying click clack. I have words and ideas that roll around in my head, sometimes clear but more often than not they blend together like a fog. This is why I stopped journaling - writing for myself, who already understands what’s going on within myself offered no real clarity. I was not forced into structure and deliberation so the fog never cleared much and the habit fell to the wayside. Later is when I picked up this little project, which, while inconsistent, is a good compliment to the writing I work on and don’t publish. This forces clarity mixed with imperfection, pressing publish forcing me to admit something can be done without going through 50 revisions. Honestly, writing is like going to the gym - starting is always the hardest part. I know I will feel better once I do it, but finding the momentum through the inertia can feel like an impossible task some days - filling the blank and void with something that apparently, has a point. I do not always love writing, but I am still compelled to do it much the way some dinners are indulgent and others are simply to sustain myself. I do not know if I will ever love it wholly, and that has to be OK.
The marvelous thing about being a reader who also writes is every so often, blissfully, someone else says it. Sometimes it’s a book, sometimes a podcast or a video essay and every time I am both pleased and relieved. Someone offers order to the chaos and cacophony of my head, of the world. A while ago Schizophrenicreads wrote about The Politics of BookTok, speaking to people’s love of stories over underdogs overcoming tyranny to save the world while insisting they don’t want to read anything “political”.
“These readers spend hours and hours looking at pages without reading. They’ve devoted their finances and entire persona to becoming a reader, but they don’t understand the stories they’re ravenously consuming. They cling to escapism, not because they want to quiet their minds from the cacophony of breaking news stories of cities being washed away in floods and the screams of children massacred in a genocide, but because they’re escaping from thinking. They pour over pages and pages and don’t know what they’re reading. The might be able to define the words on the page, but they certainly don’t understand what a story is . . . or what stories can and should be.”
The wonderful feeling of someone saying exactly what you’ve been thinking and feeling is only heightened, at least for me, by the feeling of “oh thank god, now I don’t have to write that.” These are both comfort and inspiration and hopefully, maybe, they help me get better at the whole thing too.
I am never without feelings and thoughts - I adore reading because it gives form, support and understanding to these and in its own way so does writing. I am not accustomed to the feel of writing the way I am reading, but I am working on it. Honestly, I doubt I’ll ever love it the way I love reading - like comparing my love of eating to knowing going to the gym will be tedious but worth it. My mantra, even if I don’t believe it, is all this writing is worth something.
Thank you, as always, for being here, friends. I know it’s been a while, this whole writing endeavor is…something. I am working on liking my own process and writing but I won’t get more comfortable unless I keep writing anyway. I have been thinking of just doing some book reviews as they’ll give me topics at the ready - would this be something you’d be interested in?
