Yeah I haven't written. And it's not because I've fallen off the wagon and decided that the wayside is a comfy spot. It's more like my writing demon has been stuffed with tissues and forced to shut up. Well, not forced exactly. It's just me, myself and I who decided to exercise totalitarian control over my writing demon and pressed the mute button. Temporarily of course.
Having been an on and off blogger since the age of 18, writing has served me well. It's the one outlet I've had the chance to completely abandon myself to. Sure, during the more-angst ridden years (some may argue that the correlation between angst and age is non-existent but...), I ranted, vented and went stark raving mad on my blog(s) because I could, I wanted to and in many a frustrating moment, I had to. There was also a slightly insane foray into poetry. Let's just say that I am a dead poet's society type of poet. Hence trying to find a word to rhyme with 'bastard' at 3:28 in the morning is not exactly cathartic. I stopped the poetry but I've never really stopped writing and for the sake of my own sanity, I hope I never get to the point where I throw my pen down and call it quits.
The only issue I have with writing as the years passed is the need to censor. Ten years ago (yes, I'm not THAT young), I had no qualms about letting my emotions go into free fall on a screen or on a piece of paper. In fact, the more I did it, the more I wanted to let it all out. It got to the point of almost being addictive. Even now, as I bang out this entry, I hardly stop to think about what I'm saying. It's pure, unadulterated relief to be able to open the dam and let everything pour out through my fingertips. Fortunately for me, I am a reasonably rapid typist who employs more than two fingers.
Alas, having grown older, I've come to value my privacy even more. I am, by nature a quiet creature. I hate loud noises, I hate loud people and I just hate situations where the ambient sound around me does not allow me to hear my own thoughts. Having said that, this means that I'm a quiet individual who prefers to keep a lot to myself. You could say that I live pretty much in my head. Those who know me in person would probably beg to differ. I'm quite well known for spouting my mouth and being generally sociable. This is not something I disagree with. I like being around people. People interest me. I like to be able to have a conversation and learn new things about people and expand my myopic view about well, everything. However, just because one is a sociable, it does not mean that the individual will necessarily be open about themselves. You can be very sociable and put entire groups of people at ease in any social situation without having to reveal fuck all about yourself what you're feeling or thinking. Don't believe me? Try it out at the next party you attend. Start a conversation with a couple of people. Ask questions. Talk about the latest video your friend posted on Facebook. Drive the conversation and then note how many things you actually reveal about yourself. You'd be surprised at just how little you give away. Not recommended for narcissists though.
In any case, I've been silent for a while not because I haven't got anything to say but more like I'm trying to figure out where the boundaries are. There's a lot of stuff floating around my head which is slowly driving me crazy but because I am now a responsible adult (fml!) I have come to realize that I can't always be spilling all as and when I want to, even though at times, I truly and desperately want to. You could say it's about like dating in your late twenties (oh yes, I speaketh from that fucked-up thing called experience). The older you get, the harder it becomes to meet new people that you actually want to go out with. And if that weren't bad enough, when you finally meet someone and start dating you run into a whole gamut of nightmares that make Freddy Kruegar seem like something from The Muppets. Let's face it. Dating becomes an uphill battle the older you get. There's enough emotional baggage on both sides to fill up and entire cargo plane and because of all that excess shit lying around, people have a tendency to develop weird trust issues. You just don't find yourself wanting to open up another adult. Weirdly enough, it's a bit reminiscent of being a teenager when you were pimply, and your raging hormones got the better of you. At least back then you knew for sure that you simply don't open up to adults. Because they are spawn of Satan. Well no, not really. More like, because adults just didn't 'get it' and by default, you didn't trust them because trusting them was akin to dropping yourself into a giant vat of boiling oil. Fast forward 15 years and into the dating world and you're confronted with the same effing beast from hell. Oh hello, we meet again, but this time I'm disguised as this thing you silly humans love to call 'trust'. And yeah, I'm as shitty as you remembered me to be.
Can you tell that I'm having a trust crisis?
I take no pleasure in saying this but trust is the be all and end all of most relationships. Unless you lied to your parents. Then yeah, they'll be disappointed but hey, they're your parents. You could be a child molester, a terrorist or Mel Raido from He Kills Coppers and they'd still bloody forgive you and trust you because you're their offspring. Unfortunately in most other human-human relationships, trust is a foundation ingredient and if it's laid too thin in the early stages, you are bound to realize at some point that the ground beneath your feet is shifting and you're falling off a precipice and about to hit your head. Hard.
The thing with the trust demon is that it doesn't work alone. It's got a band of mini horrors that it runs around with. Paranoia, lies, loaded questions, evasive answers and several other minions muck about at the trust demon's beck and call. At any point in time you've got about three of these little devils hanging around making you feel like total shit with the trust demon sitting on an armchair, sipping on a Mount Gay mojito and pulling the strings that make you want to go insane.
But let's not just blame the bloody demons. Let's allocate some blame to the damned humans themselves. The world would be a much easier and nicer place to live in if we all just opened up to people and were honest with each other. But that's a bit like asking for the sun to shine out of your arse so it rarely happens and you end up second-guessing, mistrusting and if you're really lucky, fucking up a really good thing. (Note: Fuck-up can be due to false accusation OR being lied to the face. Prior tests have revealed that the lying-to-the-face phenomenon tends to top the charts with a ratio of 10:2.)
Unfortunately, the trust demon usually cannot be banished by one person alone. The pesky thing requires combined efforts which means that all parties involved need to sit down with equal resolve and send it packing back to hell. But for this to take place, all parties first need to be aware that a trust issue exists. If one party or (several parties) are not privy to the existence of the issue then you might as well stab yourself with a fucking spoon because nothing, and I mean this in all seriousness, nothing is more frustrating that having a totally oblivious party.
Well, I suppose I could play the oblivious card too. For how long? No clue but being oblivious seems to be an easy option compared to all the others. Time for a fag, a decent coffee and most of all, time to give the cosmos the finger.
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