...in other words, its raison d'être. (I've always wanted to use that phrase!) The reason I am writing right now is that I am unsure about writing. I don't know anymore what the point of it is; I don't know if I can do it well; I don't know if I should do it at all. Yet this conflict is driving me to passionately expound on why lately I feel I can't, shouldn't, or don't want to write. Hence the "paradoxical" part.
This is a big hairy problem, the kind that chokes cats and clogs drains so you can't do dishes or take showers and everything just smells. It's big to me because I am passionate about very few things. Very, very few things. I am not the kind of person who throws themselves into a million initiatives with a dozen confident talents and boundless energy. A passion for writing is something I just can't afford to lose. In some ways, it's all I've got. You see, before meeting the One, I had experienced only three loves in my life: literature (starting before I could read and deepening at age 12), visual art (begun age 8), and a boy (starting age 15). Literature was the only pre-biggest-event-of-my-life passion that made it through the nonstop bumpy transitions of a 17-through-22 year old's life.
My faith in art was rocked halfway through high school, when at a summer arts program I began to wonder if Creativity wasn't just some kind of salesman-demon enticing consumer-worshippers with promises of a meaningful and everlasting life it could never fulfill. (You might think I'm exaggerating but have you seen Black Swan? Well I wasn't about to try to dance even the most beautiful dance of all time with any glass sticking in my gut, thank you but no thank you sir!) This doubt permeated everything I touched until I could barely stand to even look at my own work. My art teachers didn't know what to do with their moody disciple, and though I was voted Most Artistic senior year (the only superlative I stood any chance at winning), I think they knew their dreams for my shining career were dead.
Faith in my third love, the boy, took absurdly long to die, given that it was inherently suicidal and unstable. You know those relationships your one strange friend always seems to get into that are somehow borderline-everything -- borderline crazy-passionate, crazy-stupid, crazy-abusive? Yup.
What had always set apart my love of literature was its seeming permanence. Anything that began before my memory and hasn't yet ended has a quality of eternal existence. Just like anything that began before my memory and ended before this very day seems eternally ancient: bell-bottoms, dial-up internet, my parents' youth, Genghis Khan. It's all in the same category as far as I'm concerned. History-book stuff. But refrigerators! dentists! my body! literature! these things have the feel of forever. They will never become obsolete, never cease to exist.
I can't remember ever previously questioning the purpose of writing. There have certainly been a few pamphlets, livejournal entries, and mindless novels I wish had never been written. But literature as a whole? Words? The compass of culture? The glue of all peoples? The softener, detergent, and heater of hearts?? The clothespins of history???
Before a few months ago, I would have stooped to any level to defend words against mockers, doubters, and the willfully illiterate. Then something happened. I was given time. Time to do the thing I most respected and most desired. College was over and several full-time jobs had come to their ends. The stormy demands of performing for teachers and professors and employers faded in the clear, hopeful morning of a part-time lifestyle. I could finally Write.
And that's when it happened. Old doubts started sullying my pristine thoughts of that eternally enjoyable, unfailingly valuable and unquestionably respectable undertaking. Increasingly my mind rang with a single question: What the heck am I doing?
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