It’s get­ting hard­er to write.

Not that the spir­it is unwill­ing, although that was the case for years, when the things I need­ed to talk about most were the exact things I need­ed dis­tance from. At this point, the flesh isn’t even that weak¹, but a lack of cer­tain­ty in which to ground my per­spec­tives has become an obsta­cle. The biggest sign I’m get­ting old­er isn’t the white hair in my mous­tache, but the recog­ni­tion that I’ve shed some youth­ful arro­gance that used to feel like wis­dom.

HBO shows² and games with con­se­quen­tial choic­es based on ran­dom­ized events³ have been a huge influ­ence on my think­ing. Media with mosaics of moral­i­ty, while char­ac­ters grow and evolve across sev­er­al spec­trums (along with my opin­ion of them). Where deci­sions have to be care­ful­ly made with lim­it­ed infor­ma­tion and resources, then bal­anced against com­pet­ing inter­ests from for­eign spheres of influ­ence. Situations where a per­son can make all the right moves, and still fail through cir­cum­stance.

It’s a safe way for me to under­stand my feel­ings in com­pli­cat­ed sit­u­a­tions, as well as the per­spec­tives of those on both sides of dif­fi­cult deci­sions that are nei­ther hero­ic or vil­lain­ous. Part of my recov­ery is com­ing to terms with the past, and this explo­ration offers me a way to grad­u­al­ly accept things as they are, instead of try­ing to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for things that sim­ply could­n’t have worked out.

As a result, the scale of my think­ing has start­ed shift­ing. When I was a child, the world was defined as myself, and it was impos­si­ble to under­stand why some­one would do any­thing that was­n’t in line with my inter­ests⁴. In ado­les­cence, I saw it as oth­ers in rela­tion to myself. As a young adult, it became the world con­nect­ed as a whole⁵. Now, as a man, I see the world with time as an added dimen­sion — the peo­ple today con­nect­ed by the influ­ences of the past and their actions that will pave the future⁶.

It’s not that I don’t have any­thing to say. It’s that writ­ing becomes too much. My thoughts get lost on such a scale. Everything becomes exceed­ing­ly com­plex — peo­ple espe­cial­ly — when they cease to be defined by a moment in time.

Maybe this is why there’s no sense of per­ma­nence with which to guide my hand at writ­ing. Everything changes so quick­ly that it seems like a futile exer­cise to write until some­thing is over. Except it’s nev­er over. Things keep chang­ing, and I keep grow­ing.

It used to feel like I went through six month cycles, when my brain cells (fig­u­ra­tive­ly) replaced enough of them­selves to make me feel like a dif­fer­ent per­son rough­ly twice a year. Now, it feels like I’m per­pet­u­al­ly in the mid­dle of a transition…or one long descent into dotage. Every epiphany feels like it’s sim­ply a step on the way to a greater sense of under­stand­ing. I can’t even tell what music I like any­more; whether I’m drawn to some­thing cause I want to under­stand how it’s composed/arranged/mixed/performed, or sim­ply cause the tune is catchy. Writing has become work, and I’d rather pro­cras­ti­nate by clean­ing or cook­ing or tak­ing some kind of respon­si­bil­i­ty off Heather’s hands.

On top of all this, my need to express was often dri­ven by emo­tion. It was the inten­si­ty of my feel­ings that led to inspi­ra­tion. Nowadays, in my quest for equa­nim­i­ty, I tend to sep­a­rate myself from them. While it’s made me a men­tal­ly health­i­er per­son, it’s also left me mute, and won­der­ing who I am if not a writer.

1. Thanks to a remis­sion in col­i­tis, and con­sis­tent use of a SAD lamp. [↩]
2. Game of Thrones, Six Feet Under [↩]
3. Europa Universalis 4, FTL: Faster Than Light, Moirai [↩]
4. Even if I was play­ing against them in a game. [↩]
5. Roughly the time I start­ed to nur­ture a sense of empa­thy. I can’t tell which came first. [↩]
6. My per­spec­tive is still lim­it­ed to my cur­rent gen­er­a­tion. Someone like Shawn is capa­ble of see­ing the world con­nect­ed far beyond the scale of what I typ­i­cal­ly con­sid­er. I won­der if I’ll ever get there. [↩]