Past Thoughts on Writing

I am currently studying at Middlebury Language Schools. This post (not including this paragraph or the title) is excerpted from a journal entry from  7:17 PM on Wednesday the 8th 2017, just a couple hours after the first ever post on this blog. Spelling and grammatical mistakes included. 

It's not that I'm finding writing particularly difficult these days, it's that the writing I am doing feels difficult for me. I struggle with being  able to grasp certain topics because I am not  entirely sure about how they interact with my own self and how I view the world. My  issue is I think, entirely dependent on the fact that my world view is fractured in ways that  is difficult for even myself to understand. The way that I move in the world has been changed, utterly and that is a really scary thing for me. My opinions, thoughts, points of strength are all things that I have stood by and that are now falling away. I really do wonder  if a past version of myself would recognize  me as who I am now. And I certainly would  not want to be my past self. And I do not think I would wish to be my present self were  it not that the future is so uncertain I  find it hard to contemplate.

Forgetting

I forgot how to write an essay. It's always like this, I get my sources, I prepare, and then it comes to the blinking line on a freshly opened word document, and I freeze. How do I write an essay? What are words? How do I form thoughts, oh my goodness seven whole pages I'll die. Shaking in my worn out sneakers, panic. Breathe, I have to breathe and focus because I actually know a fair bit about both Harry Potter and Mythology so what makes me so scared? It isn't the grade, because I was fine with the test last week and I haven't worried about it. I think it's the writing. Every time I sit down to write I remind myself that this is what I want to do, what I am good at, but another part of me screams that everything I put to paper is shit and I will fail out of life.

Okay maybe it is a little bit about the grade.

But that doesn't mean it isn't also more. It's the idea of commitment. Dedicating myself to a topic, weighing myself down. But what is a commitment?

It's much easier to say that you are going to do something than to actually do it. But is a commitment really a commitment if you don't see it through?

Sometimes I wonder.

And I think (I know) that I spend so much time in love with the idea of doing that I lose focus on the present. I am consumed by my future, constantly reaching for that fruit just out of my reach, I am holding up a world that doesn't need holding and with a hush I let go and nothing happens but I don't know, I can't know that everything will be alright. Nothing feels alright, it feels broken, I feel broken and that love I put into the present seeps into the future. My future. Don't give up what you want the most for what you want in the moment, but when is my moment? When will what I want arrive? Will I ever be satisfied?