Thursday, May 27, 2004
banishing ghosts...
I've been writing a fair amount lately, both here and in my little notebooks, which is great. I love it when I'm inspired to write, write, write! But I'm noticing that a healthy percentage of what I'm writing are scenes from my past. A couple have made their ways here (for instance, recollections of the loss of my virginity and my teen-aged book-fueled hermitiness), others stay on the increasingly filled pages of my notebook.
So I wonder, why? Why am I moved to write about my past so often? It concerns me a little, because it almost feels as if I'm living there, in my past, when the words appear on the pages, bringing back the emotions that I felt the first time I lived through those experiences - both pleasant and unpleasant.
As I think about it, I realize that, though I've always tried to live in the present and look to the future, my mind has always been more than a little preoccupied with the past. I've pretty much always known this, but I've tried not to acknowledge it, for fear of giving this fact a solidity that would be difficult to move around, or through.
And then, as I read and re-read my words, working them, mulling them over, I realize that my recent memory inspired writing is coming about in an effort to release those hazy ghosts that have chained me to my past, ghosts whose remembrances seem as real - or more real - than my present at times. Ghosts that are part of what has kept me from living my life as fully as I would like. By giving weight and mass to those ghosts, moving past them would actually be easier, not harder, because isn't it much easier to keep something substantial behind me, as opposed to something wispy that could move back and forth in the blink of an eye?
So I write about the past, work to banish those ghosts, turn them into nothing more than occasionally visited memories so that I can live in the present I feel I deserve and embrace a bright, beautiful future.
Boy, I have a lot of writing to do!
So I wonder, why? Why am I moved to write about my past so often? It concerns me a little, because it almost feels as if I'm living there, in my past, when the words appear on the pages, bringing back the emotions that I felt the first time I lived through those experiences - both pleasant and unpleasant.
As I think about it, I realize that, though I've always tried to live in the present and look to the future, my mind has always been more than a little preoccupied with the past. I've pretty much always known this, but I've tried not to acknowledge it, for fear of giving this fact a solidity that would be difficult to move around, or through.
And then, as I read and re-read my words, working them, mulling them over, I realize that my recent memory inspired writing is coming about in an effort to release those hazy ghosts that have chained me to my past, ghosts whose remembrances seem as real - or more real - than my present at times. Ghosts that are part of what has kept me from living my life as fully as I would like. By giving weight and mass to those ghosts, moving past them would actually be easier, not harder, because isn't it much easier to keep something substantial behind me, as opposed to something wispy that could move back and forth in the blink of an eye?
So I write about the past, work to banish those ghosts, turn them into nothing more than occasionally visited memories so that I can live in the present I feel I deserve and embrace a bright, beautiful future.
Boy, I have a lot of writing to do!
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United States, California, Los Angeles, San Fernando Valley, English, Carol, Female, 36-40.
