the habit of being

Lacking subtlety, I do myself no justice, but perhaps I have exhausted all the justice I might have done.

Sometimes I say to myself, “You shouldn’t be trying so hard,” but I don’t listen, and it hardly matters, because I am not trying very hard afterall.

The unfortunate thing about the young writer, the younger writer like me, is that she hardly cares a bit for setting - not as far as it extends beyond the boundaries of her cranium. So there are only sentences, ungrounded, and if by luck one of them turns out well, it is still quite homeless and lost.

* * *

There was a time I believed my writing self to be my highest self. I wrote the self my day-to-day self wanted to become.

Now, it’s not at all like that. I write my lowest, foulest, most-flawed self, with all her faults magnified. I take up my notebook and my ego stares straight into a makeup mirror. I write my bitterness, my selfishness, my greed, my crudeness, my sense of entitlement, my hate, my arrogance - all the things I want hidden as I walk through the world and my relationships. I’ve actually said to people, many times, that I do not feel or understand anger, and yet you read these diaries and it is so glaring and so intense.

I would like to think this is some cleansing practice, a way to release all this pent-up self-pity. But I don’t know. If it’s on paper, then it is there. I have to stare it in the face, yes, but do I have to deal with it? Do I not just glorify it and perpetuate it further?

There is a sort of person I would like to be - a person who is loving, forgiving, compassionate - and I know that I am capable of being that - that I have had moments of realization that were quite intensely felt, quite beautiful. But those times are so hard to write about, and my narrative avoids them. This is not only true of the story of myself that I write on paper, but the story of myself that I tell in my head, the story that I whisper to myself relentlessly.

It is a constant battle not to believe that all the drama is really who I am. The most important work happens in those moments between thoughts, the gaps in the inner dialogue, but when those gaps are still very narrow, it is hard to believe that they exist at all.

There is a long history of other writers, much better writers than I am, writing of their, or from their, insanity. Writers tend to be bipolar, and I am beginning to realize that the “poles” involved aren’t simply depression vs. mania, but conflicting views of the self. There is the self that is great and brilliant and artistic, and the self that is horrid and flawed and broken. It is painted that a bipolar person would be always stuck in one of these modes of thinking, but it seems to be that the real trouble, my trouble at least, lies in the fact that I often feel both of these ways at the same time. It is very confusing to feel at once that you are beautiful and disgusting. And it confuses matters even further when you begin to realize that feeling either of these ways is a simple and similar ego-trip, and that there is yet another option that is vast - an accepting, non-judging way to look at it all, a feeling that all is as it should be and these labels have no meaning.

In the lab, we study whether objects are recognized as wholes or by parts. It seems I recognize myself by parts. The whole is just too vast, embodying too many contradictions. I don’t know why it is that I’d prefer to write the part that has to have the big crying complaining breakdown, and leave out the calm, sensible, self that steps up afterward, embarking on the next paradigm.

It may be simply that artists paint the picture of their insanity because their sanity is just too busy to pose. If only a fraction of your self is stable, that fraction has be devoted entirely to getting and keeping your life running with some degree of order. I can sit and write of my confusion and all my various feelings of loneliness and desperation, but the fact remains that there is part of me that is keeping my shit together all the while. I just don’t write about the self that is wading through a sea of scientific papers, the self that’s attending talks at the Center of Neural Science, opening bank accounts, paying taxes, learning programming languages, making me get up in the morning, watching the presidential debates, keeping me in good graces with my parents, negotiating my return to school after three years away. Maybe I just don’t find that self as interesting as the self who never grew up and never had to deal with adult concerns.