Recluse

When I was a young child, writing used to be my universe. I used to write about fictional worlds, fictional characters, fictional friends, fictional families, fictional tales that surround my consciousness and stimulate my senses. I long for those moments again, because the world will only grow more complex, more burdensome, more frightening, more stressful, more anxious as you mature and learn more about your environment and yourself. Sometimes, it seems you can never learn anything, and that everything spirals in an endless cycle, where there is no stopgap, no plug to pull, and you must swim in the whirlpool which revolves more furiously with every resistance you make.

That's why writing seems to be the perfect recluse. Each time you write, you feel in control of your world. You create your world, you create your characters, you watch them interact, you observe them grapple with the deepest of issues, you wonder how you will behave in their place, sometimes you also know that's who you are. Writing would seem to be the hatch to a diverse, flowing and flexible paradise that twists and blends to your whim and command.

But serious writing, as I now learned, is no longer that dream. Writing, if taken with drive and passion, is about communication and about relating to the social world. You can't escape from it, you never did, merely you drove yourself into a hole, but yet watching the world with intent from the inside. Secluded, yes, safe, perhaps, but detached, not. You still create strings of associations with your social world, you still try to extract the tiniest details of your psyche and you are weavin them together to create a text that will be of relevance to the audience. Unless you are capable of sculpting some "alien text", inevitably you are performing this task to communicate to your fellow peers, whoever they may be, consciously or unconsciously.

Writing is a tiresome activity, as I now accept. It came close to stealing my life away, it is just as poisonous, just as it can be gratifying. Its hunger may strike you at the oddest of moments, its presence may challenge you to question your self beliefs, its process may tire your eyes and mental energy till its job is "done". It never lets you go, at least only as far as you feel the urge to speak to an "invisible" audience, namely yourself. Writing is about a conversation that will never end, a discussion that seems clear but yet obstruse, a journey that seems to have a direction but can turn unexpectedly into a new road, and finally a sign of the lives that inhabits in all of us.