I'm in the car outside of a doctor's office, waiting for my mother to come back. I was welcomed with nearly open arms by a stranger's wifi, which exists unlocked, so I feel like I've scored and I can be content to wait here, though it's already been an hour and a half. This is the tenth blog post I've started in about a month but may never finish, and it will most likely just sit in my drafts folder until I become an inspired blogger again. It figures as well, that there's no real purpose behind this post either.
Most of my writing skills are going into writing yet another novel that's basically impossible to finish, and I just feel as though that's such a waste. Maybe that's why it's always been so difficult for me to finish any of the countless novels I've attempted to write in the past: I just find too many different things that I want to write about. It's too difficult for me to put my writing abilities into one channel alone, and then I never finish what I set out to do.
On other notes: I've decided to stop using this blog in an attempt to entertain, even though I've already stated that this was my original intention. It's just that it never stays that way, does it? A person claims they're publishing content for the sake of fulfilling their own desires and purposes, but then it all turns into a race for attention. Anything done publicly makes it far too easy to get into the habit of attention-seeking and the quest for approval. It's a constant mindset that comes with producing, editing, the removal of flaws.
I've tried really hard to be myself, to the point where I strayed away from that. I want this to be unfiltered; that's still my goal. I want this blog to be my own, not something I create for the purpose of entertaining some sort of invisible crowd. I don't want to simply try to be intelligent or to look it, I want to be intelligent. I need to stop presenting material that I've edited a hundred times, because that's simply too easy and reminiscent of attention-seeking. This is going to be my journal now. It's not going to be public because I'm trying to be someone I'm not; it's going to be public because it's a challenge to be everything that I am and I want to succeed.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Thursday, September 20, 2012
A Mockery Of People Who Feel
I don't know what prompted me to read this book in the first place. I thought the cover was interesting, and the picture on it evoked in me a certain feeling of lifeless helplessness.
"Atlas Shrugged" seemed to me like a good idea to read, and I still strongly believe that it is, but now I have some apprehensions. I'm not going to stop reading it by any means, as it has become some sort of challenge that I want to surpass and watch come to fruition.
In the beginning of the story I was enraptured with Ayn Rand's detailed description of the internal workings of the human mind. The first character she introduces seems temporarily vital, and she attaches to him certain sentimental attributes. The first hint of humility that she portrays within him is in his memories of an enormous tree that grew and lived in the area in which he spent his youth. He had a fondness for the tree that gave him a sense of security; nothing could diminish its power and nothing could make it any less than what it actually was.
I naively identified with this very first character that was introduced into the book, because I too find sappy and romantic innotations within everyday objects that could most easily be taken for granted. For this character it was that majestic and seemingly indestructible tree, which was the focal point of this character's security and sense of self. There's a specific message encompassing the tree though, I think, one of futility and false reliability. I believe it is supposed to remind and teach the reader that nothing in the world is indefatigable; that emotional attachment should never take hold in living things.
As far as I have gotten in the book, I still have no idea what role this first character plays in the story. He seems to thus far be nothing more than a sort of messenger boy; a weaker character that feels so much more than the others like human. I feel such a sense of weakness in this character that it's almost offensive, and I'm coming to my point pretty quickly here, I hope.
The more I advance in this story, the more of a slight shock to my system it is. I finished a chapter of it a short while ago and I felt the need to close to book, to absorb the paragraphs I had read. I ran a bath and tried to clear my mind but in vain, the story still filled my mind with so many different methods of analysis that can be entertained. It wasn't until the water was drained that I realized in which way this book is affecting me.
As a side explanation: I believe that all forms of art can't have a direct and cemented meaning. People think too differently to look at the world through any artist's eyes and no one can entirely connect with an artist. People make up their own meanings for things that are expressed, not only because it's human nature, but also because they can; they have the desire and complete freedom to do so. There is also no way of determining exactly how a certain piece of art is going to affect the psyche of one person, nor an entire group of people. What I'm trying to profess here is that there's no way I'm going to be able to comprehend, in entirety, Ayn Rand's meaning or purpose when she wrote 'Atlas Shrugged'. All I can pull from this story is what it does to my mind and what my mind chooses to make of it.
Here's what it's doing to my mind thus far. Most of the characters in this book seem rather sociopathic. They don't feel things for people or for any of the usual yearnings of mankind. They find no meaning in anything other than metal, concrete, machinery, money. Material wealth is the only thing that drives these people in this story and it's the only thing keeping them alive. They're egotistical, maniacal and intellectual beyond means of description. These characters are put onto such a high pedestal that fear of heights seems completely necessary, and the weak minded, warmhearted people that find joy within each other are ants beneath their feet.
I fear that this book represents a certain stature that is against my nature entirely. It seems to portray that passionate people who feel enticed to do good for others, or at least, to feel for others, are delusional and incapable of success. It seems to want to send the message that the only way to succeed is to have a heart made of steel and to cast aside fellow human beings, simply because it is impossible for persons with such high intelligence to experience anything but pessimism and regret, surrounding the fact of mutual existence on the same planet as humans who find purpose and a reason for living other than that of materialism.
As I read this I feel like I'm quietly being mocked, but I don't want to stop reading. Yet.
"Atlas Shrugged" seemed to me like a good idea to read, and I still strongly believe that it is, but now I have some apprehensions. I'm not going to stop reading it by any means, as it has become some sort of challenge that I want to surpass and watch come to fruition.
In the beginning of the story I was enraptured with Ayn Rand's detailed description of the internal workings of the human mind. The first character she introduces seems temporarily vital, and she attaches to him certain sentimental attributes. The first hint of humility that she portrays within him is in his memories of an enormous tree that grew and lived in the area in which he spent his youth. He had a fondness for the tree that gave him a sense of security; nothing could diminish its power and nothing could make it any less than what it actually was.
I naively identified with this very first character that was introduced into the book, because I too find sappy and romantic innotations within everyday objects that could most easily be taken for granted. For this character it was that majestic and seemingly indestructible tree, which was the focal point of this character's security and sense of self. There's a specific message encompassing the tree though, I think, one of futility and false reliability. I believe it is supposed to remind and teach the reader that nothing in the world is indefatigable; that emotional attachment should never take hold in living things.
As far as I have gotten in the book, I still have no idea what role this first character plays in the story. He seems to thus far be nothing more than a sort of messenger boy; a weaker character that feels so much more than the others like human. I feel such a sense of weakness in this character that it's almost offensive, and I'm coming to my point pretty quickly here, I hope.
The more I advance in this story, the more of a slight shock to my system it is. I finished a chapter of it a short while ago and I felt the need to close to book, to absorb the paragraphs I had read. I ran a bath and tried to clear my mind but in vain, the story still filled my mind with so many different methods of analysis that can be entertained. It wasn't until the water was drained that I realized in which way this book is affecting me.
As a side explanation: I believe that all forms of art can't have a direct and cemented meaning. People think too differently to look at the world through any artist's eyes and no one can entirely connect with an artist. People make up their own meanings for things that are expressed, not only because it's human nature, but also because they can; they have the desire and complete freedom to do so. There is also no way of determining exactly how a certain piece of art is going to affect the psyche of one person, nor an entire group of people. What I'm trying to profess here is that there's no way I'm going to be able to comprehend, in entirety, Ayn Rand's meaning or purpose when she wrote 'Atlas Shrugged'. All I can pull from this story is what it does to my mind and what my mind chooses to make of it.
Here's what it's doing to my mind thus far. Most of the characters in this book seem rather sociopathic. They don't feel things for people or for any of the usual yearnings of mankind. They find no meaning in anything other than metal, concrete, machinery, money. Material wealth is the only thing that drives these people in this story and it's the only thing keeping them alive. They're egotistical, maniacal and intellectual beyond means of description. These characters are put onto such a high pedestal that fear of heights seems completely necessary, and the weak minded, warmhearted people that find joy within each other are ants beneath their feet.
I fear that this book represents a certain stature that is against my nature entirely. It seems to portray that passionate people who feel enticed to do good for others, or at least, to feel for others, are delusional and incapable of success. It seems to want to send the message that the only way to succeed is to have a heart made of steel and to cast aside fellow human beings, simply because it is impossible for persons with such high intelligence to experience anything but pessimism and regret, surrounding the fact of mutual existence on the same planet as humans who find purpose and a reason for living other than that of materialism.
As I read this I feel like I'm quietly being mocked, but I don't want to stop reading. Yet.
The Affirmation of Lonely Days
I've been thinking about the nights where it's uncomfortable for me to be without a lover. I'm not used to being a 'single' person or having the way I feel depend so much on myself. The last time I was a happy, healthy, satisfied single girl was when I was fifteen. Even then I wasn't perfectly happy, for I was curious about the dynamics of relationships and it seemed to be that the 'cool' thing to do was to settle down with a guy and keep a relationship going for as long as possible. It seemed that the girls in school who had boyfriends were the happiest with themselves and that they had the most knowledge, pertaining to what, now I do not know.
The first time I fell in love was when I was sixteen. It was a life altering and destructive experience, and I'm not quite sure why I'm bringing it up now. Maybe it's just to get the history straight in my own mind; to affirm to myself that that period in my life is when all of my trouble with co-dependency began. When I fell in love (as childish as that love may have been) at sixteen I went from a relatively confident and ambitious person, to a nervous little animal that wanted to do nothing but follow and obey. All I could think of doing was giving pieces of my heart away to this person, recklessly and with nothing less than abandon. I didn't think of the consequences and I didn't realize how much I was changing inside and how much potential I had lost in myself.
The details of this 'romance' aren't necessary to reveal other than the fact that it changed my personality entirely, as I'm sure it does to everyone else who enters the same 'room', as it were. When you're that young and you're exposed to such a heavy obsession with another person it lessens your ability to take care of yourself and think of your own needs. You start to feel as though you'll crumble and become nonexistent if you don't hear from the other person, and your own opinion and feelings of yourself become obsolete without the affirmation from that other person. In a sense you lose yourself. Such a young mind, in my opinion, just does not have the strength to deal with those kinds of emotions without serious repercussions.
That's what I think happened to me, and at such a young age: I lost myself. I developed the line of thinking that consists of this incoherent need for another person in my life; an invested devotion that was completely unhealthy. I started thinking I was completely incapable of adapting to this world without a mate, so I looked for one in every member of the opposite sex that I would come across. All of them had a certain 'sparkle' to me, well almost all of them. I had a brief set of standards then that I do now feel like reviewing now. At that time when someone would match my 'standards', I wanted commitment with them and I wanted to settle down. Without such a thing happening I would grow irreversibly depressed and felt unfulfilled.
It turned out that when I was eighteen I met someone I believed I had fallen 'in love' with. That train of thought lasted three and a half years with this person until it ended with a malignant crash, this very year. It was a tragic time because I realized so suddenly how much I had relinquished of my youth to these men who had barely any regard for me. Maybe they thought I was attractive, maybe they thought I was funny and cute, but did it go much farther than that? It was a question I never managed to consider until this year. I didn't realize how shallow my connections to these people were until a mere three months ago. Then I wondered with an even deeper appeal, these things about me that I so wanted them to see in me, did I even see them in myself? I had completely disregarded for so many years the importance of seeing such aspects within myself, I forgot or never even learned, how to love myself.
I'm looking now for good and affirming traits, not in other people or shallow men, but in myself. I'm trying to be good and independent and strong and most of the time it works. There are a lot of days where I feel more safe than anything, from being hurt and misused, than I feel like I'm lacking some sort of other half in my mentality, just because I'm not a part of a relationship. I feel now that I may be able to reverse a lot of damage that my co-dependency has caused me. It's a slow process and some days it feels like I'm being flayed alive, but it's something that must be done.
Maybe this is an experience that everyone has to go through before they can be reborn. Maybe the happy and strong single people that I always seem to find and that I see in my life have been through this very same pain and loneliness; maybe they have it a lot worse than I do. No, I'm sure that they have had it the same and they have had it much worse.
These are just things I think about when I've had too much coffee late at night and have nothing that much more constructive to do with my time than write and post.
The first time I fell in love was when I was sixteen. It was a life altering and destructive experience, and I'm not quite sure why I'm bringing it up now. Maybe it's just to get the history straight in my own mind; to affirm to myself that that period in my life is when all of my trouble with co-dependency began. When I fell in love (as childish as that love may have been) at sixteen I went from a relatively confident and ambitious person, to a nervous little animal that wanted to do nothing but follow and obey. All I could think of doing was giving pieces of my heart away to this person, recklessly and with nothing less than abandon. I didn't think of the consequences and I didn't realize how much I was changing inside and how much potential I had lost in myself.
The details of this 'romance' aren't necessary to reveal other than the fact that it changed my personality entirely, as I'm sure it does to everyone else who enters the same 'room', as it were. When you're that young and you're exposed to such a heavy obsession with another person it lessens your ability to take care of yourself and think of your own needs. You start to feel as though you'll crumble and become nonexistent if you don't hear from the other person, and your own opinion and feelings of yourself become obsolete without the affirmation from that other person. In a sense you lose yourself. Such a young mind, in my opinion, just does not have the strength to deal with those kinds of emotions without serious repercussions.
That's what I think happened to me, and at such a young age: I lost myself. I developed the line of thinking that consists of this incoherent need for another person in my life; an invested devotion that was completely unhealthy. I started thinking I was completely incapable of adapting to this world without a mate, so I looked for one in every member of the opposite sex that I would come across. All of them had a certain 'sparkle' to me, well almost all of them. I had a brief set of standards then that I do now feel like reviewing now. At that time when someone would match my 'standards', I wanted commitment with them and I wanted to settle down. Without such a thing happening I would grow irreversibly depressed and felt unfulfilled.
It turned out that when I was eighteen I met someone I believed I had fallen 'in love' with. That train of thought lasted three and a half years with this person until it ended with a malignant crash, this very year. It was a tragic time because I realized so suddenly how much I had relinquished of my youth to these men who had barely any regard for me. Maybe they thought I was attractive, maybe they thought I was funny and cute, but did it go much farther than that? It was a question I never managed to consider until this year. I didn't realize how shallow my connections to these people were until a mere three months ago. Then I wondered with an even deeper appeal, these things about me that I so wanted them to see in me, did I even see them in myself? I had completely disregarded for so many years the importance of seeing such aspects within myself, I forgot or never even learned, how to love myself.
I'm looking now for good and affirming traits, not in other people or shallow men, but in myself. I'm trying to be good and independent and strong and most of the time it works. There are a lot of days where I feel more safe than anything, from being hurt and misused, than I feel like I'm lacking some sort of other half in my mentality, just because I'm not a part of a relationship. I feel now that I may be able to reverse a lot of damage that my co-dependency has caused me. It's a slow process and some days it feels like I'm being flayed alive, but it's something that must be done.
Maybe this is an experience that everyone has to go through before they can be reborn. Maybe the happy and strong single people that I always seem to find and that I see in my life have been through this very same pain and loneliness; maybe they have it a lot worse than I do. No, I'm sure that they have had it the same and they have had it much worse.
These are just things I think about when I've had too much coffee late at night and have nothing that much more constructive to do with my time than write and post.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Daily Dose
Lately it's been so hard to solidify any single train of thought, to make sentences that I could present to the world in an attempt to show meaning. The preceding hardly makes sense; I want to break away from writing things that only make sense to me.
It's been months since I've publicized any of my writing and I know I have had my reasons for such a hiatus, the main one being issues of self-consciousness. Sometimes when you sit there and try to write while knowing the public is going to see and analyse each word and give the piece a certain degree of meaning (perhaps far from your original intent), it weakens what you're trying to say. Whatever divine and pure element of yourself that you're trying to portray to the public through writing more often than not remains locked inside, for fear of what's going to be thought, or said about it, or for fear of what it's actually going to end up meaning in the end.
An example of what I'm so sloppily trying to say, would be the description of a dream you might have had. Once you wake from sleep where a certain memorable dream has occurred, the happenings of it are already muddled. You may have to think for several minutes about the important details before writing it down and immortalizing it, but then you might realize you can't be certain you're not exaggerating these details and you may feel that the dream can never be accurately recorded.
For me this is what happens every time I have tried to write a blog post as of late. I double check every thought and emotion regarding my project so many times that the it becomes dry and it all starts to feel like one huge exaggeration I have created this blog as an attempt to counteract this characteristic within myself. My goal now is to write with as much color and ferver as I am given by the thoughts and ideals that come into my mind, as soon as they do. I want to be able to do this publicly and with vulnerability. I don't want any pretenses.
Are my motivations to do this selfish? Are they selfless? I don't know, and I don't think those should rightfully be the questions asked. When it comes to art and the freedom of expression, I don't believe it's anyone's business whether or not the artist has selfish intentions pertaining the production of his/her art. I believe that there should be no guilt or shame within the self-indulgent qualities of expression and creation. If what someone creates is full with meaning and purpose, and if it manages to move another person because they can connect and relate to it, then the artist has accomplished selflessness indirectly, and they have made their mark within the world; be it for their own wellbeing or for humanity's.
It's been months since I've publicized any of my writing and I know I have had my reasons for such a hiatus, the main one being issues of self-consciousness. Sometimes when you sit there and try to write while knowing the public is going to see and analyse each word and give the piece a certain degree of meaning (perhaps far from your original intent), it weakens what you're trying to say. Whatever divine and pure element of yourself that you're trying to portray to the public through writing more often than not remains locked inside, for fear of what's going to be thought, or said about it, or for fear of what it's actually going to end up meaning in the end.
An example of what I'm so sloppily trying to say, would be the description of a dream you might have had. Once you wake from sleep where a certain memorable dream has occurred, the happenings of it are already muddled. You may have to think for several minutes about the important details before writing it down and immortalizing it, but then you might realize you can't be certain you're not exaggerating these details and you may feel that the dream can never be accurately recorded.
For me this is what happens every time I have tried to write a blog post as of late. I double check every thought and emotion regarding my project so many times that the it becomes dry and it all starts to feel like one huge exaggeration I have created this blog as an attempt to counteract this characteristic within myself. My goal now is to write with as much color and ferver as I am given by the thoughts and ideals that come into my mind, as soon as they do. I want to be able to do this publicly and with vulnerability. I don't want any pretenses.
Are my motivations to do this selfish? Are they selfless? I don't know, and I don't think those should rightfully be the questions asked. When it comes to art and the freedom of expression, I don't believe it's anyone's business whether or not the artist has selfish intentions pertaining the production of his/her art. I believe that there should be no guilt or shame within the self-indulgent qualities of expression and creation. If what someone creates is full with meaning and purpose, and if it manages to move another person because they can connect and relate to it, then the artist has accomplished selflessness indirectly, and they have made their mark within the world; be it for their own wellbeing or for humanity's.
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