as small as a world and as large as alone

I don’t know what to say.  I don’t want to deny that I’m good at writing certain feelings down, because that would be an insult to people who could never write those feelings down.  But I also don’t want to deny that I’ve worked for years to be able to do this:  Everything I write, generally, has taken between two and fifteen years to sit there inside my head and form into something I can write about.  Sometimes it’s taken going back every day for five years and being unable to write about something, and then one day finally it happens when I’m not even expecting it.  I guess what I don’t have is control.  I can’t control what I’m able to write about.  And for every thing I can write about, there are a hundred things I will never be able to write about.  You can’t see that from the outside, because it’s easy to see your own insides but hard to see anyone else’s.  So you see what I do write, and figure that it comes easy.  And that’s understandable, but not quite true.

So I don’t want to diminish the fact I can write about things you can’t.  But I also don’t want to diminish the amount of work that goes into it, or the fact that I can write about less than a percent of the things I want to write about, or the fact that I have very little control over what I can write about.  Although with every year, there are more things I can write about, and that helps.  

I still remember being 19 years old, trapped in a hellish living environment, and not even being able to literally write what was happening to me at the time.  Not able to write about the emotions.  Not able to write about my physical environment.  Not able to write what I could and could not do.  All I could say was “I need services” and people would ask why and I couldn’t explain that I was living in filth and squalor, that I was peeing in my living room, that I wasn’t eating, wasn’t drinking, and had become so disoriented due to sensory issues and hunger that I routinely got lost in my one-bedroom apartment (with glass doors, mind you, so you could see the whole apartment at once), and fell down a lot, and got stuck in one place a lot and couldn’t move.  I couldn’t even say that last paragraph I just typed.  So I couldn’t ask for help.  Not without help from other people who knew my situation.  And I couldn’t write about my situation online, and when I wrote about even a teeny bit of my situation, people would deny it anyway, if I could type, it couldn’t be all that bad.

It was September 2, 2005 before I could write, in full, about what had happened when I was living by myself, before I got services.  Or at least, this is the most I ever wrote about it at once.  It was not that I set out to write about it.  It was triggered by the writing of a friend – most of my writing is triggered by something, or comes out of the blue, I don’t control it – who was having similar problems.  And then I wrote a blog post you can read here if you like:  You Have It So Good.  So all the events of that post took place between December of 1999 and August of 2000, roughly.  But my ability to write about them took place 5 years later.  That’s average.  And that’s for concrete events, not even feelings or other things that are hard to describe.

Some things get easier with time, such that the first time I write about them it will take ten years of nothing or near-nothing.  Then I can write about it better and better.  And then it becomes added to my ever-increasing repertoire of things that I am capable of pulling up and writing pretty much whenever I want to.  But anything in that repertoire is something I paid a price for.  Writing is hard work, and writing is even harder work when you grew up with mixed receptive and expressive language problems of the type I had.  I am very lucky that I have the talents that allow me to surpass those problems, because the problems remain very real and very much an obstacle every time I set out to write something.

So I don’t want in any way to downplay my talents, because it takes talent to be able to overcome the internal and external obstacles to writing, that I’ve faced.  Although I also think my writing has major, major flaws, so I don’t think I’m super-talented either.  In particular, I’m not good at being concise, I can’t control whether my writing is long or short, I’m overly detailed, and I in general have trouble controlling any aspect of my writing.  It comes out as-is and I can take it or leave it but I can’t modify it much.  But I also do want to make sure you know that it’s not that I just magically write and words come out.  Writing is a struggle.  Writing is one of the most difficult things that I ever do, and only an intense compulsion to write and communicate and create (hypergraphia, a.k.a. Dostoevsky’s syndrome) has caused me to develop it to its full potential.  Everything I’ve ever been able to write has taken years of work, much of which is “silent” work – work that results in no actual writing, or work that results in writing on a completely different topic.  I have very little control of the topic of my writing, it comes out in the topic that it’s going to come out in.  I usually lack the discipline (or whatever it is) to force myself to write on a topic without meltdowns, shutdowns, and other problems.  At least I’ve gotten past the point where writing used to involve whacking myself on the head repeatedly throughout the process of writing.

So thank you very much for the compliment.  But also understand you’re comparing your insides to my outsides:  You see the product, but not the struggle.  The truth is somewhere in the middle:  I probably express myself better than you express yourself, but I also express myself worse than you think I do.  Meaning, most of what goes on inside me still goes unexpressed because I lack the ability to express most of what goes on inside me.  

It’s possible you’d be able to develop more ability to express yourself, or it’s possible that no matter how much you tried, you wouldn’t.  For me, I know that self-expression has been one of my number one priorities since reaching young adulthood, and that affects things too.  When something is your number one priority in life, it has a better chance of happening.  But there are also people whose number one priority in life never happens, so it’s still a crapshoot.  (For instance, I spent years dedicating myself to learning other languages, and I’ve learned something but I’ve never got past a first-year level in any language no matter how much effort I put into it.)  So it’s possible that you could learn to do better, but how much better is up in the air.  And sometimes you don’t know until it happens – like that post I linked above, came after five years of slamming my head on a wall, sometimes literally, and never being able to describe that period of my life in that much detail until I finally wrote the post.  And weirdly enough, while I’m now more able to describe that period in my life than I used to be, I’ve never again been able to describe it in the level of detail I did in that post.  Much of my writing is a one-shot deal – it happens once and then it’s gone forever.

So, yes I’m good at writing.  Yes, I’m better at expressing some parts of myself than you are at expressing yourself at this point in time.  But it’s also more complicated than that – “my islands of ability have steep cliffs”, to quote Susan Solursh.  And it’s possible that you could learn – or it may not be possible, and I’m not in control of that.

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