~ Rewriting Myself

“All my lies are always wishes. I know I would die, if I could come back new.” — Wilco, “Ashes of American Flags.”

A friend of mine asked, in a thoughtful comment on a previous entry, “How can you feel old and lonely, when you can write?”

From where I sit, the question struck me as absurd. But the man who put the question to me has a pretty sharp mind, so I had to think on it a bit. Surely, he knows as well as anyone that how one can feel has nothing to do with what a person can do. Then, why this question? “How can you feel old and lonely, when you can write?”

I can say, “Because I just do. I have good days and bad days.” —— It’s an answer. It works. And yet it would satisfy no one, for it steps gingerly away from the true meaning of the question.

Why are you CHOOSING to feel this way?

We are all empowered beings. As long as there is warm blood in our veins and breath in our lungs, we should — and do — possess more power than we know. The thought patterns that hold us down are evidence of the power we have within us. Many of us use our own minds against ourselves, subconciously, instead of turning the energy around to direct us forward, and upward. We probably don’t mean to, but I suppose the process is so insidious, so subtle and so constant, we don’t even know we’re doing it. We learn rapidly to blame others, or to point forlornly at outside forces, as we shuffle quietly off to our graves.

Or, if we can write, we discover breathtaking, and equally insidious ways to project our melancholy out onto the world. We seek and are granted communion with those who are touched by the way we string words and ideas together, even if nobody gains anything from the exchange, but an even better understanding of the sad feeling they already knew too well.

I wish I could rewrite myself.

I wish that I can push one hand through one ear and rip out the brains I’m functioning with. Rip them out and throw them away, then start over with something cleaner, something more efficient, something less vulnerable to pessimism and instant gratification. But I can’t.

Instead, I must become diligent enough to use this rotten brain to fix itself. It should be impossible, but it’s not. Many others have done it, by rigorously interrupting unhelpful thoughts and redirecting them to brighter conclusions — until such patterns became habitual and rewarding. I can imagine many more others tried this and failed, or got on medications that screwed them up even worse in the long run.

Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest writers ever, blew his own head off with a shotgun. See? This is how my mind works. The first example I thought of was the least helpful — to say the least.

At least Hemingway accomplished something before he did it. Me? I gotta do something about myself, or I’ll never be the man, or the writer, I could have been.