I’m fighting this feeling that keeps coming back up. Every so often I get a merged insight into things, a combination of old hatred and current disgust. I think it’s good to have some motivating force, but anger makes me cloudy. It overrides everything else, makes me just want to shout and rant and be furious. But it won’t help me write so I have to wait for it to pass. Just writing this now is hard, I can feel it at the edges, after remembering how much my mum has gotten away with already. Whenever my words come out normally, it’s a description of a feeling or a sense, but there’s nothing to describe here, no intricacies, no wisdom to be gained. Just rage, and a desire for vengeance.
What’s concerning is how often this might start to happen, as I start to move towards the darker stuff. I think my method so far is effective though: don’t think about too much at once. Instead, I keep the direction in mind, focus on the steps I’m taking at the moment, then once that’s written about, I’ll move forward. This helps me explore things more too, keeping just one scenario in mind, looking at it from different angles like I’m setting up a photography shot.
Still, it scares me. I realised today that I’m re-visiting old music, taking myself back to the headspaces I used to have. But I don’t know how much I want to remember. Is it worth it? Would it be helpful, or would it create the emotional wall I’ve described above? How far do I need to go, and what might happen to me as I plunge into all those repressed memories? It took me a very long time to recover from everything, and the defenses I’ve built exist for a reason. But, at the same time, I hate reminding myself that, after all the abuse my mum put me through, I might as well have given her a free pass, when I visited her on her birthday and talked to her like a real person, not remembering just how vicious she really is.
So that’s my motivation, in a way. My notepad, which is almost always open on my computer as I use it for everyday memos, the first line I see every day is “I hope it hurts” — words she spoke to me as a doctor gave me butterfly stiches across what’s now a faint scar. That phrase, just by itself, is enough to remind me of my mission. I can read it and remember my hatred, without needing to experience it all over again. I’m doing this for him, that boy who who was taught that his everything was worthless. I’m doing this for my sister, who never got the validation I was lucky enough to have later. And I’m doing this for me, to get all this shit out of my head once and for all.
Another concern, one without emotional weight: I wonder how long I can sustain my current writing style. It’s high density, lots packed into small parts, and I wonder if the wells will dry up. Or, perhaps worse, I’ll have written entire chapters within other unrelated chapters, so much that there’s nothing left when the time comes to properly focus on the matters previously alluded to.
But I think, too, I’m probably underestimating myself. When I talk, it’s about a hundred things at once, and I never run out of new thoughts. Over the course of a full conversation I can weave the threads between the waves of past and future thought. This is something new to me. Never before have I been able to remember what was said, or thought about, prior to the current moment.
I’m very much enjoying having this story in my head, and how it feels to be a real writer: to have a mental map of how things are, and will be unfolding, a chronology, a plan. I’ve weaved within a single piece before, but this feels more like a tapestry than patchwork. I can see how I’ll set up X now to lead into Y much later, preparing the reader with the necessary tools and wisdom that I myself needed to reach each new milestone of understanding.
I’m even thinking about characters, to an extent. I’m not aiming for historical accuracy, I’d much prefer to give an interesting insight that differs from how things really are, if it works for the story and the feelings I’m aiming to express and generate (which is, basically, all of them!).