Some Narcissistic Musing

There was a time when I wrote ceaselessly. It was a nightly ritual, purely narcissistic; I wrote for myself and myself alone. The words formed a history of thought, and I value those tattered pages because they illustrate both continuity and change. I revisit these old journals from time to time and can't help but laugh. It's the same story written in new ways. Same thoughts, new metaphors. Same feelings about different people.
There's a bias I'm always mindful of in these retrospectives. When you talk to yourself, it's probably because you don't have someone handy to listen to you. I still value the insights, but I recognize that they emerge from a particularly lonely, particularly discontented iteration of myself. The inwardly-focused person in those pages isn't me, entirely.
This disjuncture between who I think I am and who the journal represents makes them objects of a weird sort of anxiety. On the one hand, it's someone I consciously am not. The thought that someone else might read them and who they'd make me out to be as a result is terrifying. On the other hand, they are meaningful. Equally terrifying is the thought that the insights I find so precious are just wasted words, valuable only to the author.
I don't write much anymore. You could say it's because I'm not lonely and don't need to write for myself anymore. That's a problem--for someone like me, writing is essential. I shouldn't have to feel isolated to make it happen. I think the larger reason, though, is that I can't figure out how to work through the disjuncture all that old writing represents. In a way, returning to the blog is a way of getting that process started.
The anxiety here is obviously unwarranted. It's a problem for me because it's about me. For anyone else, it's something to either ignore or just feel a little awkward about. Maybe I have someone's sympathies here, maybe not. It's not particularly important. Still, I'm willing to waste a few words here because I like the idea that how I think and what I feel doesn't have to be confined to closely-guarded journal pages. A fool's hope maybe, but it's a start.

Untimely returns

Somewhere deep down, the intention for this blog was to be part lectern, part confessional. The minister preparing a sermon or the Catholic child summoning sins to be forgiven both agonize over every detail preparing, because souls are at stake in finding the proper combination of words to speak before God.
It's time to betray that intention. The half-finished posts sitting in the queue, that never quite found the necessary perfection to be presented to the lord of the heavens represent too great a weight to leave behind. My return to writing is untimely because I don't have the time to craft perfect offerings, and I haven't since I stopped posting.
Yet here I am. Grad school doesn't make for free time and nothing is perfect in this life. I have nothing to confess, nor do I want to craft sermons. No souls are at stake. One of the imperfect thoughts waiting to be finished to be posted is about the impossibility of communication. Perhaps it went unfinished because if it were a perfect thought there would be no point in voicing it. New creed, then: cogito, ergo dico. I think, therefore I speak.
Thoughts unvoiced refract in idle minds. My brain feels like a marching band in an echo chamber sometimes. Every trivial thing gets caught in some network of ultimate significance that must be wholly uncovered before it can be made real. A silly mistake for someone who reads Nietzsche--it's stupid to theorize an ideal world when we live in a real one. Robert Frost might have put it better in For Once, Then, Something. The best we ever get when reflecting is a hint that something exists beneath the mundane. Stringing together discontinuities reveals only the continuity of imperfection. There's no value to it; at least not in the sense that the endeavor intended.
So, for an untimely return, this is a celebration of imperfection. May the ideal silence the real no longer. I write now in hopes that echoes become ululations; chaos become celebration; discontinuity become encounter. I hope you're along for the ride.