Catharsis

7.40pm 3 March 2007 Saturday

Trine asked me some time ago, why I had stopped writing. To tell you the truth, the urge to write just slipped away from me as quietly as it slipped back in today. I used to think in words and paragraphs, as if my thoughts were being composed for an unseen audience that I would later try to form into prose. Somewhere along the way, the clear sight of my thoughts suddenly fell into a deep, dark fog.

I had begun to live day-to-day and worry only about the immediate and impending, instead of seeing with a child's clarity what is right and what is wrong. In this adult world that I wasn't ready to plunge into, there were so many different shades of grey. Shadows lurked in the foggy darkness, but I went on with life as I had known when the sun was shining brightly.

At some point I must have known that I was only turning around in circles while getting lost in this fog, but people see what they want to see. I thought I was still safe with clear sight of where I was going, but in reality, I had projected my destination while stumbling about in murky depths of the real world.

Writing has always been a cathartic process for me, but it's a very demanding lover who requires all your attention, all your faculties and for you to know exactly what you're trying to say. If you don't even know what is happening in the world around you, then writing becomes a tedious task because every word you try to use is like trying to fit 2 wrong jigsaw puzzle pieces together. You hunt and search for the right words, but if you're already blind in your inner world, it's highly unlikely that you stumble upon the exact words you're looking for to convey your feelings.

Unfortunately ever since I've moved to DeKalb, I've only experienced spurts of reality and a lot of my addled thoughts. Here in the quiet room and looking out at an unchanging landscape, I suddenly feel a little charge; a spark of what was before.

And then it fades away. Every day I struggle to find my purpose again, to seek a goal that I'm truly working towards other than graduation. Where is my Self? Where is my Path? I need my guiding light - this fog has to lift. I push and push at it like a weightlifter huffing and puffing to raise the barbells, but the cunning greyness slides away, evading my pathetic attempts to master it.

Is this depression? I don't feel depressed. In the same time space where apathy pervades, guilt lingers around like a sour understudy in the wings. Who is in charge here? What is the next line in the script? I feel like I'm clawing at thin air, clutching at rays of light like a beached whale gasping for air.

Somehow this writing experience isn't exactly cathartic; if anything, it raises more questions. But I need to find some reason to live, other than a distant future in 2 years. There must be a push factor for me to do well other than guilt at staying on in school while my father toils to pay for school. I feel short of breath, even as I run in circles in my mind's eye, looking for the way out of this dark icy vacuum.