Thinking Unthoughts

Words are failing me, or perhaps I'm failing them. I have a pressing urge to write something meaningful and throughout my days little notions and ideas emerge—ah, there's a topic!—but then later when I place my fingers on their respective keys on my keyboard, perched like runners waiting eagerly for the sound of a gunshot, their feet pressed to their starting blocks, the gunshot never fires and my fingers never start the race to manifest the meanings and thoughts in my head. But why?— they've never been stubborn like this before.

An idea usually hibernates in my head and as soon as it drags itself out of that slumber, it finds itself somewhere in my wrists, itching and wriggling for my fingers to set it free. Now something is wrong. I experience the ailment as thus: my fingers have become judgmental. They no longer channel the sporadic spurts and the tangible flows of my mind to the paper or the screen which I had envisioned them on, without first weighing their value as severely as with an ancient egyptian heart. When has value ever been an issue in my writing? I have always been comfortable with writing pure "nonsense" and treating it with as much respect as a "respectable" text. But I've somehow lost respect for my own nonsensical writing. "Ech, what's the point of writing down this stupid thought?' Its exactly this question that freezes and stiffens my fingers into unwilling deserters, and causes plenty of single-sentence ideas to rest forevermore in the draft folder.

I've been wanting to write about witches, and that I think I am one. And what if there was another witch-hunt? And what if witchery is a dying art? And.... But that idea went nowhere.

I've been wanting to write about parkour, which I tested out and have now done a total of two times. I only know the basics about it and have so little experience that I don't even feel qualified to write about it. Not even about my first time doing it. I love to reflect on my first times doing things, especially since first time experiences are intense, packed with emotion and memories, hopes and fears. But somehow I felt a chokehold on that idea, like I wasn't allowed to explore it and throw those first impressions onto a page while they were still fresh and palpable. I didn't allow my naïve take on the sport crystalize into an accepted thought, and told myself "Wait till you've done it for a while and maybe then you can write about it."

This attitude towards my own thoughts is kind of concerning. For years I have written daily in journals, memories fresh of the press as alive and real as they could be. Unprocessed, raw emotion and experience captured in ink. I didn't necessarily write those experiences with much, if any eloquence, but who will ever read them but myself? I wrote so often that I saw myself growing through the pages of my own book. Flip back a few weeks—wow, was I immature! I react the same with this blog. I cringe at half the entries older than a year, but that's okay. I've set this blog up as a measuring stick for my own mind. It's intended for freedom, for growth, for flow, for whatever!! This is my playground and yet I am behaving like a bratty little child that refuses to play.

Why am I being my own worst enemy, my own harshest judge, and restricting myself from letting my ideas fly? I would love to write about witches, about my fling with parkour, about my fears of getting the stomach flu again this season, about my fascinating work as a nanny of a single baby and the incredible relationship I'm harboring with her, and perhaps about more personal things. Why then am i expelling myself from my own school, banishing myself from a land that I am king of? I rule here! This is my domain and yet I feel like I've alienated myself to such an extent that I'm looking for rules in a rulebook that I never wrote for myself.

Maybe I'm just becoming extremely Swedish and am afraid to say what I really mean, afraid to start any conflicts, afraid to bruise or offend others, afraid to stand out. Afraid to be any more than just enough. And I am more than that, let's be honest. I'm totally weird and expressive. I'm a complete dork and I don't really fit in to any social molds or cliques. I am brave and try strange and scary things. I am kind of all over the place. Of course, I try to hide this from everyday social interactions and keep my weirdness to myself, my closest friends, some members of my family and my boyfriend...I thought to this blog as well...

Or maybe I'm just out of practice. Perhaps my free-writing skills have been crammed away in order to make room for the "learn Swedish by writing structurally sound essays based on various text forms, that will be graded, and your grade will affect your chances of studying at a university" type of writing. Maybe I'm trying so hard to write properly in school that I have forgotten how to let the fuck go.

Did I ever write about my trip back home to Hawaii, and how intense that was. After a year and a half of not having seen my parents. After basically abandoning my life there and moving across the world on a whim. Did I forget to write about that? I can't very well do it now, can I? The experience isn't fresh and alive anymore.

Did I forget to mention Christmas in Bavaria (Germany) and the weeklong stomachache that I had when I came home after all the food and sugar? Or that I came home with a persian rug through a snowstorm in Norway and my flight got delayed and my luggage and rug got lost?

Or New Years and my resolutions and wishes and dreams?

And this winter—I haven't said a thing about how I'm handling my second Swedish winter, and it's almost February! Spring is around the corner and I've neglected to pay my written dues to the season I'm in.

I'm missing out on so many great opportunities to keep track of my life here. I know that I've downsized on blog writing, and I've completely stopped with my private journaling, in order to allow the feeling part of my life to consume me and my experiences, rather than being consumed by hypo-rationalistic thinking as experiencing and then processing and feeling later on paper, as I've done in the past. This I find good, but I also regret that I've abandoned this blog and I'm ashamed that I've begun to judge my thoughts so harshly.

Well, I guess I've gotten this much out. Maybe next time I'll actually write about something interesting.