I'm supposed to be writing. I'm always supposed to be reading or writing something. Any moment spent not doing either of things, even if they are activities designed to keep me alive such as eating or sleeping, make me feel procrastinator's guilt. It is ludicrous that I'm writing this right now, though the extremely low volume of posts lately makes me feel a different kind of guilt.
I feel like I've been spending both abnormally large and extremely small amounts of time on myself lately. I am striving for improvement based upon a self-help plan of my own design, and I can feel it working. I can feel progress in way I don't think I ever have. Usually, I can mark my progress by my constant introspective musings; I can see where I've been, write down where I'm going. But I haven't been lately. I haven't been writing about myself.
Does that have a simple explanation? Moving back to school and then school itself is time consuming. I don't have time to sit around and ponder my own existence. On the modern hierarchy of a college student's needs, food, friends, working, homework all come before long hours of self-reflection. Perhaps it's growing busy, growing more mature, growing away from the self-centered world of an adolescent?
But also I am making such active strides toward change. Shouldn't this provide more to write about than any previous times in my life? Shouldn't it be a catalyst for creativity? Am I taking out whatever part of me inspired me in the first place? Are those parts worth losing in order to be more socially acceptable? Is that what I'm doing here? Making myself into a socially acceptable human being, something I never felt I was before.
In my memoir class, we constantly talk about the guilt the writers feel in using the lives of their families and friends, sometimes leaving them ravaged like a mountain after the coal miners have passed through. But they never consider what they're doing to themselves. Isn't probing your own mind just as risky? Do I harm myself by living inside me all of the time? Can I live somewhere else? No, not happily.
What is growing up? What is maturity? Who am I?
I am always a list of hypothetical, rhetorical questions I will never answer. So I write.
