The Middle Distance

This is not a journal. At least, not in a traditional daily event recording sense. 3rd grade is my earliest memory of wanting to be a writer, a real writer with the ability to change people by using words. I've begged on my knees for me to be a writer. The one thing I've been failing to do is write. Little things, here and there, a few poems published in places no one will ever read, short stories, but nothing real, nothing me in a very long time.

The purpose of these entries is to change that. I don't expect to say anything profound or earth-shattering here. This is a place for my stream of consciousness to take shape, for me to practice putting my thoughts and feelings and stories into concrete words so that someday I will have a story to write, something to offer up to the world that I really worked on and opened up my veins to fill. Some of it will be stories, some of it will be rambling. If you read this because you know me, then you probably have little idea how hard it is for me to admit to insecurity. If you, random reader, stumbled across this in your wanderings let me offer up something, one wanderer to another; we are the opposite of lost. Lost is knowing where you're going, knowing where you belong, and not knowing how to get from where you are to there. I know where I am. What I have no idea about is where I want to be next.

That may sound strange considering my first paragraph, but I'm a complex person. Not in the sense that I am complex; more in the sense that I have a complex. Several. I am insecure and easily threatened and desperately seeking affirmation and the strongest most underlying belief windows I have all say that I can never share what they say because then people will know.

I'm rambling. Let me attempt to be concise: a "belief window" is basically an invisible "window" hanging in front of a person's face and through which he or she perceives the world. Each person's window contains written statements of their own beliefs, and those statements are created by that person's own experiences. For example, if I had been bitten by a dog when I was small, the words "dogs are dangerous" would be written in my window, and I would view all dogs through it. Whether or not the statement is true doesn't matter; people everywhere have "I'm not good enough" or "I'll never be as good as, as pretty as, as smart as, etc." scrawled on their windows everywhere, statements that once under objective observation are immediately ridiculous. And we know they are, but "knowing" and "believing" are two such separate and even disparate terms that the one hardly influences the other.

Did I mention that I'm smart? Oh, it's very important to me that people know that I'm smart. I'll "never be as pretty as" and "never be as musical/funny as" my siblings, so smart is what I got. If I sound harsh or bitter, let it slide. People usually start writing because they have something that's been stewing around inside them for so long that it starts leaking out, and most often the things that people hold onto are negative, so first writings or entries or poems usually come across angst-riddled, and then mellow out like a deflating tire.

I suppose I should say something about the title of this post, and the title of my blog. It's my desire. It's what I want to find, somewhere. When I was younger, I had passion. I talked to rivers and the moon and believed that I could have anything I wanted if I only wanted it badly enough. Everywhere was music and everything had magick and I lived furiously. I had every goal, every dream, both for the next minute and the next lifetime. I've lost that. Now I don't know if the music is gone or if I just can't hear it anymore over the clamoring of the mundane, and I feel sick because I can't find the magic and I don't know if its because I don't believe it anymore or because now every Christmas I know how expensive and stressful it is to be Santa Claus.

But I can't give it up, can't walk away from all the cables tethering me to this life, because I've chosen what to tie myself to and it requires me to pander to repetition. I don't want to be that unconnected anymore, while at the same time, I want to hear the music. I have to find that balance between focusing on only the immediate survival needs before me, and on goals and objects so far in the distance that they're only there because I hope they are. I need to find a middle ground where I can be that writer that I've always felt I needed to be, where the music and the magic can find me when I can't stand not having them anymore and I can believe that my belief windows aren't absolute, but where the tethers that matter most and that I need most are not slackened. That place between the near and the far, that middle distance.

Comment if you like; I'll read them and I'll care about them and I've left them as open as they can be, but I don't dare ask for comments. Not for this. For any stories or poetry or writing ideas I post, yes, please, absolutely. I'm horrible at taking criticism but I'm hoping this format will provide enough of a buffer for me to deal with that. For just the rants, as you like. I may never know what you think otherwise.