the desperation of writing

Once you start writing your life - your thoughts, feelings, experiences - putting moments to paper and immortalising them in the process, it becomes manic desperation, if slightly softened by poetic meaning. What was habitual becomes addictive. 

The ability to defy time, to bend the rules, gives a power over the universe, and develops into a stubborn defiance of anything ever being lost. I can fish the past from my bookshelf, I can re-inhabit moments and recall fleeting details from them that would otherwise be lost to space. As Louise Gluck wrote about birthdays, I feel about writing. I am at the end of the gaze, staring back at myself through the pages. I can inhabit my old mind and body in a way that should be impossible. The more vivaciously I write, the easier this becomes. But the more lost I get in it.

There is desperation in this denial of the rules of space, this crude time travel. Somewhere in this poetic meaning, in the feeling of being part of something wholly profound, there is despair in time ceaselessly falling away, and moments becoming just what they can be recorded as.

It is nice to remember moments as they happen and in detail. The taste of the wine, the sunset, the song that was playing. The ‘I am here now doing this’ creates a thread of time connecting past and future in writing and then in reading. But I found myself manically committing moments to paper as they were happening, at the expense of the moment.

The ability to capture moments and suspend them in time is a compounding addiction that makes instances exponentially more indispensable. Everything must be captured and preserved to ensure that it is never really gone. That it can be dusted off and revisited. By writing, I can create a space I can crawl back into.

It makes it hard to let things go, to let moments pass by you. To let feelings flow through you or experiences just happen to you. Once it becomes such a habit, you find yourself reciting the day and clawing moments back from a space where they would’ve been forgotten. In a way, they are artificially held up to a light and preserved in case I might need them one day. Incase I want to remember how it felt to be in my body at this moment.

I am deeply nostalgic. And with this comes significance in everything. I feel the warm ache of nostalgia leaning on both sides of me all the time. From the present on to the past, and from my future self on to the present moment.

I once wrote: ‘I have now what I knew was coming all along. A feeling of nostalgia for a difficult time that was made less difficult by the nostalgia I knew I would feel for it.’ I feel all of my selves around me all the time. I am in conversation with these selves every day either by reading or writing. In this way, I live in the past, even in the present. It is accessible to me and vivid. I am deeply aware of the present as the past, making it precious.

Noticing my desperation in committing my life to paper, I have started experiencing a moment and not letting myself write it down, to let the moment and the feelings pass through me, to be remembered or forgotten as nature sees fit.

But what makes a moment important?

Did a moment happen if I didn’t commit to paper and therefore memory? If I didn’t make it part of something wholly profound by deciding I would remember it?

Where do things go when they are forgotten? And why would I want that for even a moment of my experience?