Going to try to do my best to post what’s been on my mind lately. It’s a little jumbly, but those with a keen eye should be able to sort it out.
There are a handful of shared sensations between those who are writers. (I say those who are writers to mean those who cannot help but write, hopelessly bound to the art of language.) Truman Capote managed to outline two of them in what little I have read of his thus far. One of the two he mentions is that feeling that one either is a writer or isn’t. I had always known of this as a child, but never really understood what it meant to accept your position on either side, or what it would be like to pursue such a passion. It’s easy to say you are something, to perhaps even feel that sensation of being it, but for that thing to be thoroughly challenged as it had been for me? In the last year or two I have spent countless hours on other pursuits in an attempt to forcibly expand my horizons and stuff myself with information. When I returned home last summer, in the ensuing internal pandemonium I hastily decided it was necessary I put all my effort toward catching up with where I thought I should be. So much wasted time, I was thinking to myself then. So much to gain and so little time in which to do so!
This was a very unwriterly way, a very un-me way to think about the consequences of the choices I had made. I should have known, based upon that, that it wouldn’t suit me to go down the path I chose, but should-have-knowns are useless here. My application to school accepted, I moved into academia and away from most every friend, acquaintance, or everyday situation I had come to know since beginning work at Nintendo. At first, head-strong and stubborn as I tend to be, I marched into the thick of school without giving myself time to think or breathe. Distinctly I remember having the epiphany in August that my knee-jerk reaction to keep myself infinitely busy was preventing me from being Adrienne. I had become a machine that past year, and earlier this year I again became a machine. My pursuit was of lost time, and there is not a man on earth who can conquer it.
I voluntarily pushed myself through my first quarter back in school, staving off depression with little else but the hope that things would finally fall into some kind of comfortable arrangement and the edge of uneasiness digging into my chest would fade. Spring break came and I did next to none of the things I proclaimed I wanted to do, instead too tired and withdrawn to leave my computer most days. I signed myself up for classes that both scared and energized me when I thought of actually going through with them.
At this point, I have done chemistry, math, painting, drawing, music, and social science. And what have I learned from my intentionally broad-stroked choices these past months?
That I am a writer.
Let me explain it to you.
The engine I was basing all of these decisions on in the vehicle of school and private instruction was the need to learn, plainly and simply. I was pursuing topics I knew nothing about and had never participated in, or topics I had previously set aside for a later point in my life, or even topics I knew I would dislike. The point of doing all of it I told myself explicitly: to have new experiences, learn new things, train my brain to make new neural connections and, of course, to gain that lost time I was always looking back at.
Never did I once consider for these past months that this drive could be directed in any other way. I did not stop to ask from what source it was stemming. Those of you who are writers, or perhaps know me well, can say where it would come from. It is one of those unique writer’s sensations, that strange combination of wanting to experience and learn everything, and understanding that those experiences are necessary if one wishes to become better at writing. I was misdirecting that sensation, pointing it at all sorts of other things, looking for something that would never be found.
Starting maybe a week ago, I had a creeping realization of this. It was only finalized when I read Truman Capote talking of the exact same sensation and its necessity to good writing. I am a writer first. I can be a violinist second, a painter, a comic artist and so on, but I will always be a writer first.
When you are something, and you know it through and through, that is where it all begins. What you do with it is what separates the good from the great. As for me, I will be writing to my heart’s content. My goal is to be a clear writer, a great writer, one who approaches the pinnacle of what writing can become if one puts everything one has into it. Of course, I have more personalized goals, especially for specific pieces I someday wish to create, but if I put all of myself toward it, those will come with me and manifest themselves in the journey ahead.
