Words, by the cubic fuck-tonne in In which our ignoble friend

I’m naturally inclined to use 2 ten dollar words and change where a brief, contemplative silence would probably fucking do. Or at least, when I let myself say things, the inclination emerges. I buried it under a large number of heavy things and left it there for years, and it is consequently looking a bit worse for wear, but the more I type the more it seems I want to type. Which is good. And here is why.

I’ve gone back to school. I’m currently some part of the way the an Access to HE Diploma in Combined Sciences (if you are wondering what a one of those is, I envy you, friend. The world in which one need not know is so infinitely brighter and less complex a place. Pity me, for I have gone beyond your reach, into the shadow of yadda, yadda …) and have been presented with a number of tasks to complete.

Long suffering readers (of whom there may be exactly 2, excluding my ignoble self) may recall that I was already studying science. At degree level. Oh, how have the mighty significantly regressed. Anyway, a pleasant upshot is that I know a bunch of this crap already. Frequently pertinent factoids come lurching out of the murk of long term storage with nothing more than a gentle nudge. So, I’ve learnt the stuff before and my previously freakish recall still has some juice. One might put 2 and three together, for to get 5, about now. One would be sadly mistaken.

There are writing tasks. Pointless, brief, disgusting writing tasks. And I cannot do them to save my godforsaken life. In the last two months I have broken into cold sweats, ground my teeth, slept without rest, failed to sleep, raved, contemplated violent suicide and given myself hives (Hives! I have caused my skin to spontaneously blister and swell with the power of my mind! And cortisol! And being a fuckup! for the first time since I was, maybe, 12?) by trying and (this part is important) -failing- to write a thing. Not as in, I wrote it and it was unspeakably bad and I recoiled from the screen hissing before engaging in the aforementioned. Straight couldn’t write. I typed the phrase “blood is a liquid” so many times that, had I not been rapidly and aggressively deleting it between attempts, I would have pages of it. Reams.

Somehow, between when I used to write (years ago) and now (now) I have let a filter that I built for social reasons spill into wrong parts of my brain. When speaking to people or posting online, I have tended (when sober, well rested, and not caught particularly off guard) to parse anything a couple of times before publishing. I ask if it’s worth it. am I being funny enough to justify the attempt. will it come across right. could it be misconstrued as hateful, or pointless, or overly affected, or emotionally loaded, or a faux pas, or poorly constructed, or, or or oror or. Or.

This filter has been good to me, although really it’s just a pathological avoidant behaviour - avoiding confrontation, avoiding rejection, avoiding interaction because it typically leads to some amount of the first two. A way of managing inputs so that I didn’t have to deal with my anxiety. A shitty thing. But effective, and very helpful both in conditioning me to be more socially normal and in keeping me approximately sane. In the wrong place however, it has fucked me up. In the process of attempting to unfuck the fucked thing, I am writing this absurdly long testament to my own proclivity for extraneous verbiage.

Over the last week, I wrote about 5 pages of material, which, when honed down to one, weren’t completely shit. From the age of about 4, I can recall instances of what can only be described as crippling perfectionism - my favourite is that I wouldn’t draw a picture of Thomas the Tank Engine because I was incapable of drawing a perfect circle. This typing thing is that drawing thing, approximately. If I stop to look at this flaming shitheap, on a sentence by sentence basis, I’ll never let any of it live. I will self flagellate for the crime of failing to hew from the raw substance of the universe the platonic ideal of a sentence conveying my intended content and meaning, delete it, gnash wail, type it again, and repeat, ad actual nauseam. I had forgotten, until this latest task, that the best results are approached by harsh approximation and a thousand gradual refinements.

By such means a rough block may be a sphere, and a bunch of word vomit may be a passable excuse for a UCAS personal statement.

(I applied to universities tonight. Finally.)

dearest and most delightful of me’s: please do not forget that you are neither terse nor pithy by nature. Nor are you enormously clever, nor capable of works of startling insight or breathtaking beauty. You are offensively prolix, your prose a reeking purple mess, such meaning as is concealed artlessly within neither surprises nor delights. But you can write like the devil is sitting behind encouraging you gently to write things, and you are the single most vicious editor you have ever met. So … do that, yeah?

Last updated January 15, 2016