The first in a series of probably less researched personal essays for the Muse Ariadne project.
I think sometimes that nothing is true until I write it down. That I am not real until I write myself down.
Writing is hard for me. I think in words, in sentences, in fully-formed thoughts, but they are somehow not the same as the words that exist outside the barrier of my own skull and can be put in order on one page.
I've been writing frantically and nearly nonstop as long as I can remember. I get comments all the time on how fast I type, or how fast I handwrite. It's the result of pin down the churning of the internal and external worlds all at once with absolutely no shorthand. My handwriting is nearly illegible. I've never been able to keep up with the speed of my thoughts. Once I start, it's always been nearly impossible to stop.
I was raised by the family computer, casting bits of my fanciful whims out into chat rooms and roleplay forums and abandoned freewebs websites and hundred-page-long open office documents full of fiction, but I didn't learn to touch-type until I was about 12 or 13. We had a computer class, and I thought I already typed fast enough with my two index fingers (I wasn't hunting and pecking, so much, because I knew where all of the keys were), and I didn't see the point in "learning to type" the way that my teacher wanted me to. About 3 days into the touch-typing unit, before I think I'd done more than the home row exercises in the typing software, I decided it was getting too annoying to switch back and forth between my two typing styles when I got home at the end of the day, that I had writing to be doing, and I've touch-typed every word I've written on a keyboard since that day. Surely, it's been millions.
I wonder if it's been a billion words. I know that's a much bigger number than people can really imagine. That feels about right.
I refused to write poetry, as a teen, because it was too cliché and I didn't get the point of writing about emotions. They were not objects of interest in themselves, I thought, when there were whole worlds that people could imagine whenever they wanted. I got told off in fiction-writing classes for luxuriating in images and details too much, for writing little poems in the metaphorical margins of my loosely-plotted stories. Hemingway prose was in vogue at the moment, I suppose.
I don't really write fiction anymore, aside from fanfiction. One of my best friends is a horror author, and he still remembers when we were both in high school writing silly little fantasy stories and reading them out after school. I do write as part of my day job, technical articles that take months of working over less than ten thousand words, but nothing like that.
I talk a lot about fanfiction and poetry as attracting me by being unmonetizable. I want my hobbies to be free from perverse incentives, so I can love them freely with the knowledge that I can just put them down. I do not want to be beholden to them, and at the same time, when I don't wrestle with any of my jumbled thoughts long enough to pin them down to the page, I wither away.
There's some part of me that still fancies that I might one day start to monetize the kinds of philosophical essays I write on here. I don't know that it would be a good idea.
I watched a video about stenographic keyboards recently, and I've been daydreaming about learning to type all over again. What if I could finally write as fast as my thoughts? Would it feel free, or would I still be too tangled-up to fit fully on the page?
Writing is something I've felt good at for most of my life. It's the thing I come back to. It's my gifted kid's burden. It's two hundred thousand individual kinds of things.
It's not flashy, and sometimes, I feel the huge grief that large swaths of the internet have entirely left my slow imperfect eternal skill behind.