Whence

It's hard to write something authentic. It's hard to be authentic. It's hard to be authentic when others are around. It's even hard to be authentic, honest to myself. I avoid painful thoughts about my sister. I have been avoiding painful thoughts for years, maybe for decades, about my life, about what really happened. What seemed so normal then, becomes more horrible at the same rate that I am changing, seeing more clearly, becoming clearer about everything. Become clear about one thing and it spreads throughout. Thankfully clarity is contagious as well, not just ignorance. It takes much longer to gain clarity than to impose ignorance on yourself, blinders, but apparently that's the price we must pay. What has been destroyed or at least severely damaged in me in a few years, takes decades to undo and reshape, transcend, reprogramme.
I wrote a short story about a fire last week. Right after I wrote the previous post I heard some strange noises outside. It was 3am and when I looked out the window there was a shed on fire, with the flames roaring up, just a few backyards from mine. It scared me.
All the houses were dark, people were sleeping and then this roaring fire.. The next day I started writing a one page story about it and spent at least 15 hours on it, rewriting, rerewriting, rererewriting.
It helped me calm down, a lot. Even though there's been a group of arsonists roaming around this neighbourhood for the past months, the writing helped. Then I saw it was shit.
It started out alright, I took the writing advice to heart and wrote a first draft without editing every sentence. Write first, rewrite later. So the first draft was fresh. Then I revised it TO DEATH. With axes and hacksaws and lots of blunt objects. Then I wrapped a rusty chain around it, dumped it in a building site and poured concrete over it made from baby-bones and puppy teeth. Then I peed on it. And then it was dead.
So. Within days I wrote a cute little story about an experience, rewrote it to death, brought it back to life so I could kill it again and then squeezed the last drops of life and potential out of it til it was a bore to read. Something which had scared me to death became a boring recipe for a boring meal. Now that's what I call talent. Sometimes I write poems and they just come out and I leave them like that and they're just right, exactly as they should be. Not great, but true. Sometimes people say: you said what I feel! Thank you. Cos they're authentic. They come from within and I don't get to dick with them. Most poems get either rewritten to death or aren't good enough to bother with any of that.
It's the impatience, the impatience that can't be killed. I have to be patient with my impatience. Which I cannot. I am trying, I am. Letting go, realising it doesn't have to all be good this year. I don't have to fix everything by myself, this year before the world ends or some such thing. it can't end yet because I haven't done my part yet. Impatience, things must be rushed, hurry hurry, or my important work will be in vain, too late, not useful to anyone.
All will have been in vain. If I don't do this, if I don't do that.
Hurry hurry.
And so I saw that my little story was shit and it shocked me.
How on earth am I going to write one of the most important, world changing books if my writing is shit? Good question, right?
The upside is, that this is no longer a question for me. My doubts, all the distractions of the past decades, which weren't distractions but necessary detours to work out shit, well MOST of my doubts have evaporated. Because of a book I was once again reminded of the dream I had when I was a kid, the most important dream I ever had, which basically told me I was going to be one of two people to meditate evil away from the world. Or something like that. I don't want to go into details.
If I can't admit this to myself, how am I ever going to write a book about it?
My destiny is this book, to write this book and pour into it everything I've been through in my life and more importantly, what I've done with my experiences, how I used them to gain insight, reprogramme myself, from the depths of human scumness to the peaks of enlightenment. Except I am not enlightened, so there's another reason why I shouldn't be in such a rush. It's hard enough to get a clear image of the structure of the book. Because I haven't reached 'the end' of the journey yet. How can I write about something I have not yet experienced? I only had a taste.
Of course I am worrying about effects, when all I have to do is keep working on the causes. Everything will change from the inside out. From whence comes this sense of haste? (Did I use that word correctly? It's so pretty.)
Upside to noticing my writing is shit. A few days earlier I still thought it was pretty good. I guess that's progress. In the same way I can pour out my heart and worried little mind here and a day or two later think 'what drivel, what the hell are you doing.' So, progress. You can't fix something if you are unable to see it's broken, where it's broken, where the screws must be tightened, where glue must be applied, where sweet words of mechanical tenderness must be whispered to create a whole again out of a pile of broken pieces.
The mosaic.
My destiny is clear. Trust is building. The feelings of unrest and haste are silly, as if everything could be perfect 'if only' the pace was upped. As if the Universe is right in and about everything except the speed with which it comes to its conclusion. Conclusion being just a word, I don't know what will happen, I only know a little about my part and how it will unfold. Or not. I would like to read my book.

Reading this thing over, this nearly made me cry so I'll copypaste it.

it can't end yet because I haven't done my part yet.