Writing

Fairly shortly I think after I wrote the second time about keeping a diary, I ended up somehow stopping writing in it. At first, merely only rarely, when something “significant” happened or I felt like I actually had something new to write, but at some point I just stopped completely—probably because I simply forgot to do so after dropping the habit.

The problem for me became—which I also at times have with the blog here—that I just felt like I was repeating basically the same entries most days, which let’s be honest aren’t usually that exciting. Now, of course, the purpose of a diary isn’t to be exciting but to provide an opportunity to both reflect on the happenings of the day and allow you to look back on your past state in order to have a better idea of what you were actually thinking at the time—something which otherwise gets all too easily lost in false memories of one were to try to rely on ones memory alone.

The problem of course, is that when the activity becomes repetitive it kind of loses its shine to me and becomes boring, which means I’m both less likely to do it and more likely to question its purpose—neither of which is very conducive to actually keeping on going with it. This of course prevents me from taking the opportunity to actually reflect on why I keep writing the same things day after day, and if those things are not to my liking how I might go about changing them.

Because of this, I feel like I should give it another try, or at least something like it. I think I could really benefit from some sort of deeper reflection on the state of my life as I feel rather lost in where I’m going and what the meaning of everything is, but at the same time it feels somewhat silly to try the thing that already failed once again instead of something else. Maybe what I need is merely a different approach to the same thing, to be more deliberate of what I want to include and perhaps even just keep it shorter, maybe even just a few sentences, so that it get distilled to the core of the message.

The question, then, becomes what is it that I would want to include? What is important enough for me to want to try to keep track of it on a daily basis? And finally, how do I want to do it—merely pen and paper as before, or do I want to enter the digital realm both with the opportunities that provides but also with the reality of it being something of a less tactile experience? Is being able to leaf through a book of my own writing something that has value to me in some way, or is the easier organization of digital files worth the switch?

I’ll keep pondering these things, but it definitely feels like something worth pondering, as I know I must do something to change the current state of affairs and perhaps a greater awareness of exactly what they are is what I need to influence change in a better direction.

Earlier this year I found myself looking for a new keyboard, and the difficulties I had at the time finding a keyboard that met my needs lead me to start thinking about language. The problem with finding a keyboard arose from language, since I had some rather particular wants in the new keyboard and those were in general rather hard to find, but even more so when looking at ISO keyboards, since the vast majority of the more custom market seems to focus on ANSI.

This phenomena of American and English being default and standard isn’t exactly new, especially not in computing and programming—basically every programming language uses English as the base language as it were, with some rare exceptions none of which are widespread—but my problems finding a keyboard merely threw it more sharply into focus for me once more.

It frustrates me a rather great deal, because as someone for whom multiple languages have always been rather present and having been raised bilingual with English following at a rather young age, I can see the importance of language to myself rather clearly. Learning and knowing several languages has enriched my life to such an incredible degree, allowing me to express myself in new ways as well as learn to know different people and cultures to a completely different degree. Even writing this very post I find myself resorting to translating my thoughts from other languages to English—not necessarily my mothertongue, mind you—because I can simply find the perfect word for what I want to express in that language even if it might not come to me in English, allowing me that much better to express myself. I could probably achieve a similar thing by perusing a dictionary, but that would end up being so inefficient as for me to give up and not express myself fully instead of taking the time to find the exact right words for what I want to say.

Thus I find myself becoming rather frustrated at this pressure put upon us both culturally from the behemoth that is the American entertainment industry as well as well as technologically from the very machines we use to express ourselves being created in this way that is so very centered on the experience of being American and using English. The most recent frustration I had with this was Nextcloud, which even though I set my settings to use European English for the locale, defaulted to displaying dates the American way which is just yet another one of these small ways that inconvenience everybody else. Another example is the insistence of the Ghost—the software I am using to write this very post—to show the week beginning on Sunday instead of Monday, another from what I can tell American custom, with no obvious way to change that.

At the same time, I can so very well understand the appeal of being to communicate with what feels like the whole world in English, and the self-perpetuating circle this leads to—everyone knows English, so things are made in English first, which means everyone knows or learns English to use those things and so on. Even I, despite these feelings at this point in time, chose to start this blog in English instead of my mothertongue because it does allow me to communicate with so many more people and to be part of the global discussion to a completely different degree—even if what I write here mostly goes unseen by the world at large. English is, despite its silly rules around spelling at times and confusing idioms, such a very convenient language to use for pretty much everything in the digital world that I find it difficult to blame anyone for doing so—I did it myself for a long time, thinking anyone who used one of our local tongues on their machines as either cringe or old—and as my proficiency with German comes to a point where I feel there might be more harm than good done in using it as the system language due to poor or incomplete translations am considering ending my personal one woman crusade against using English everywhere, I can’t help but wonder if the gains in the end outweigh the losses and how cognizant people are of the decision they are making, or if they are merely acting out of convenience.

Every single person probably has their own answer to this question, and while I might decide in the near future to give in to convenience a bit more, I think I would be very sad should the future do away with the beautiful plethora of languages we as a species have developed over time and merely defaulted to a single one out of an overwhelming need for convenience. If that day were to come, I think we would have lost more than we had gained.

There was some hubbub recently around Tusky, a app for Mastodon, getting removed from the Google Play Store. It has fortunately since then been reinstated, but it did remind me to take another look at Mastodon and consequently the fediverse as a whole.

Mastodon, in case you aren’t aware, is a federated alternative to Twitter—federated meaning it’s not a central service run by one organisation or company but several different persons or organisations each running their own instance yet capable of talking to each other, a bit like email. The fediverse on the other hand refers to all of the different services talking this same protocol, allowing all of them to interoperate to a degree. There are other services that function as alternatives to things like Instagram or YouTube as well, though there I don’t really have any experience.

It has been a somewhat interesting experience so far, trying to start to use something that is very clearly built as a social and sharing platform, when both of those are things that don’t come particularily naturally to me. It’s very clearly more of an active effort to actually think of things I want to say there, as well as sometimes overthinking what is acceptable for me to say. Simultaneously, I am rather fascinated by the whole idea for some reason, both from a techical as well as a social aspect, so there is a certain drive there for me to continue to do it, I just have a hard time figuring out what to do with it.

I feel like that’s a trap I fall into somewhat easily, liking an idea but having no idea what to do with that idea or lacking the motivation to see it through.

There remains, of course, the option of using it in a similar manner to which I use Twitter currently, namely as an observer and reader. This time around I have been rather more succesful in finding things to read that I also want to read—so the option is definitely more appealing now than it was before, and I don’t think I will end up completely stopping using Mastodon at the very least—but for some reason remaining an observer feels like the wrong move. Sharing things publicly is definitely an activity that is outside my comfort zone—I think this blog works because I know basically nobody reads it—but I think exactly that is what makes it potentially so valuable.

Why you ask? Because it is both something I feel like I want to do yet uncomfortable, which means it is an opportunity to widen the horizon of things I am comfortable doing and in doing so not only allow me to learn new skills but improve my self-confidence as well. Widening my horizon is in general something that I am quite interested in at the moment, since I have this sneaking suspicion that I’ve arrived in a local maxima of sorts. I’ve grown comfortable with where I am and terrified of going anywhere since it feels like all paths lead downwards; yet I’m sure I have not found the peak.

I’m in a strange place when it comes to typing at the moment. I am currently in the process of learning to do ten-finger typing, and it has gone rather well so far, however there is a small thing that is bothering me a bit about it. There was a small remark in the program when starting it, noting that one shouldn’t revert to the old way of typing, even if one needs to type fast for something temporarily, and the problem is I seem to have taken this into heart a bit too much. It’s gotten to the point where I think I’m avoiding typing to a certain degree, because I’m worried about making mistakes, and instead resorting to using the mouse for things where I’d previously typed a search.

Now this fear is obviously hampering both my ability to learn and my ability to do things since it takes me longer, yet I persevere, for some to me unknown reason. I still, even while writing this post, am doing my best to keep up with the skills I’ve learned, taking my time, and thinking the actions through I need to take in order to get my thoughts on paper as it were. It feels really strange, typing in this way, especially since it gives me a heightened awarenes of any mistakes I make, which again isn’t exactly motivating.

Despite all of that negativity I’ve just written, there is also a sense of accomplishment to the whole thing, having taken something new and learned it in a relatively short time, a week or so. I am still far from perfect at it, and make what feels like a ton of mistakes especially when I try to go faster for once, but all of that is part of learning something new, I have to remind myself.

It feels a bit strange, but the biggest change really seems to be the lack of confidence I have in my skills now, that is holding me back from performing better. This lack of confidence however, is a good thing to a certain degree, since by going slowly I am better able to notice when I try to take shortcuts an accidentally revert to my old way of doing things. I then at the same time tend to notice why I shouldn’t be doing things the old way, since I spot inefficiencies and conflicts in the way my fingers are moving. I try to correct myself when I notice that, erasing what I’ve written and writing it again correctly, and that again feels good and like learning is taking place—even if it is a bit annoying since it does hamper my speed even further.

I’m also noticing my strange dependance on glancing at the keyboard, which again makes me slower since it makes me all the more aware of what I’m doing. At the same time, I don’t really have problem with writing with my eyes closed and that to a certain degree seems to actually even be easier since I can concentrate on what I’m doing better. Maybe that really is the way for me to learn the best, writing with my eyes closed, though there is only so much I have to say at one time and it tends to get kind of repetitive. So back to practising for me then.

Earlier this year, I stopped my habit of writing something in my diary daily. I’m not quite sure why, it just happened, one day I didn’t write anything and the next day just kind of followed from there. It might partially have been just that, missing out on one day leading to a demotivational spiral, where it didn’t feel like something I could do or perhaps needed to do. On reflection, I am also noticing a certain trend in the writing I did, where I had kind of hit a pattern of seemingly writing the same thing with different words and not really taking the time to actually reflect and write what was meaningful about that day.

Now, certainly, days that don’t necessarily have anything meanginful to them—at least on a personal level—do exist, but the lack of actually having the habit and taking the time to reflect on the day also definitely lead to me not writing about the days that did have something important in them and consequently not reflecting and perhaps remembering that.

I think the more important part might be, rather than forcing myself to write something, anything, to take the time and think if there is anything I would like to write that day if I haven’t done so already, or perhaps catching up the following day if anything comes to mind while lying about to sleep. The self-empathy of not punishing myself for missing out on recording something when there isn’t anything to record is important, as is I think recording it when it was meaningful to me that day. What’s meaningful might change with space and time, but that doesn’t lessen its importance in the moment, so thinking about it and actually processing it instead of supressing it is a good start.

So the last week or so—could be longer, could be shorter, it’s hard to keep track of time for me—I have actually been writing pretty much on the daily again. There were some difficulties and perhaps more boring entries during the start, though even then I did have thing to record from the previous weeks that I had neglected before so I actually ended up surprising myself with the amount of writing I had to do. It’s a strange feeling sometimes, of only actually realizing what I have been thinking about and feeling when I need to put it into words and write it down, since before that time it has merely been an unacknowledged ambigious feeling, the process of writing it down makes it all more concrete. It doesn’t always yield all of the answers, but it is a helpful tool on the way there.

I am not quite where I would like to be with the process yet, since it is perhaps too frequent occurrence that I don’t yet take the time to do this reflection and end up doing it in bed before sleeping instead, making both falling asleep as well as actually recording it accurately more difficult than it needs to be—I tend to do it the following day so as to not make falling asleep even more difficult—but this is a learning experience for me, and making mistakes and not being perfect from the start are allowed.

It’s a curious thing really, since this blog has become sort of another diary for me, chronicling my thoughts and feelings, but due to the different audiences and levels of privacy, the content is quite different. At the same time, despite those differences, both mediums help me process my thoughts and feelings and are a valuable tools in doing so.

I guess it had to happen at some point, but it would seem I have missed my weekly deadline. It happened oddly quietly in a way, I thought about writing something a couple of times during the week, but never could really think of what I wanted to write, and when Sunday evening/night rolled around, there where simply sufficient other things going on to distract me from remembering to still write something that I just kind of didn’t.

Were this some sort of corporate setting and more serious a subject, there might be some sort of post-mortem of what process allowed this to happen and what steps will be taken to prevent it in the future, but at the end of the day, this is a personal project and something I’m doing for my own benefit, so the whole thing getting delayed by a few hours doesn’t really change all that much, if anything at all. Now, sure, it might to a certain degree contribute to a personal feeling of failure, and that can definitely be harmful in the long term but I’m also learning how to deal with such things better so I’d say it’s not really harmful at this point.

So what does this mean in the end? Nothing more than I get the opportunity to write two posts this week instead of one, and maybe having a break from time to time isn’t all that bad, I could of course prepare posts ahead of time if I feel the need to take a break but if that’s forced it doesn’t really feel worth increasing stress in order to reduce it. Anyway, bit of a diversion this time around, hopefully something more interesting next week.

I have always had something of a fascination with “old-school” methods of communication, from relatively recent things like e-mail to the original long-distance communication method: letters. I’m not really sure where this fascination comes from, since I am on the other hand also someone who likes modernity and technology a great deal, but maybe it is exactly the eccentricity or the effort involved that makes it have more of a personal feel that draws me to them.

Now, this does not mean that I have spent a great deal of time in the past writing letters or sending postcards, I think I sent a letter in elementary school once and since then nothing else really, but having my mother read some old letters that her mother and other older relatives had sent in their youth along with a general desire to explore this communication method made me start sending letters. I haven’t as of yet sent many, well two to be exact and only one has arrived so far, but the reception so far has been very positive, they noted it was very sweet and personal to receive something like that. I think it was a combination of choosing to send a handwritten letter instead of printed that contributed to that feeling, along with it being such a rare occurance in today’s society that it simply stands out.

One of the reasons that I have sent so few letters as of yet and and a problem I am discovering is, that for many people who would be the most suitable for this kind of communication on account of me not actually talking or chatting with them that much otherwise at the moment, I actually don’t have the address for. These are people whom I know rather well and have a decent amount to do with in the past and might even know where they live, just simply not what to write on an envelope so that it reaches them. I could, of course, simply ask them, but that would kind of spoil the surprise.

So, at the moment, it does at times feel a bit silly writing letters to someone I already at the very least chat with pretty much daily, though it does provide the opportunity to communicate in a different way about different things when writing something a bit more long form, and it is quite simply nice to have someone to write letters to since I do enjoy it, and perhaps it only being one person does make it a bit more special for the two of us.

Even then, I think this is something I want to expand upon in the future, probably start writing my parents in the summer since we don’t see each other quite as often then, and possibly other people once I find a fitting excuse or way to get their address without raising too much suspicion.

I seem to have, once again, come to something of a slump when it comes to my writing, or rather my motivation to do it. I’m not even sure that it’s a case of motivation, though it does definitely play a part in it all since I’m having difficulty actually sitting down and starting to produce something, anything, but also a matter of not being quite certain what I want to write about and what I should write about the matter I don’t know I want to write about.

Now, I have been smart enough in the past to save some ideas in my drafts that I can simply take and start writing about which is exactly what I ended up doing last week. But the problem with that arrangement is that when I simply force myself to do it out of a feeling of obligation the fun does disappear to a degree and, for me at least, what I produce takes a hit since I can’t truly motivate myself to actually think about what I’m writing. So having access to a sampling of ideas of what to write about is great, but I do then also have to feel like actually writing about one of those things in order for the whole ordeal to actually go anywhere moderately sensible.

I did also mention a feeling of obligation, which is somewhat silly, since the obligation is to myself alone since it was my decision to try and keep up this pace of one article a week and last week for some reason just ended up being particularily bad where I at no point really had the motivation to truly write anything. It wasn’t the first time I’ve written the post the night before, but it was the first time I can remember where I truly had no idea what I wanted to say and just put out something, anything, in order to fulfill this constraint I set upon myself.

The question then naturally follows, what am I doing about this? Can I even do anything? Unfortunately it is one I cannot answer, however luckily it seems that it was for now at least a one time thing, a natural consequence of the varying levels of motivation that I tend to have. I suppose, also, I am in fact working on answering that question, since I am going to therapy, but I suppose also, that finding the answer to something like that is going to take a rather long time indeed.

In the meantime, I’ll just have to try to overcome these phases as they occur however I can, and in the cases such as last week where I finally did accomplish actually producing something not being overly harsh on myself for not being perfect every time—especially since a big part of this whole process of doing it regularily is actually trying to improve and become better and when doing that one is going to have difficulties and less than perfect output, but that is merely a part of learning to be better at something, and even the best of us fail at times.

It’s, well, not really strange since I’ve known it for a while, but interesting to once again notice how much I seem to enjoy writing. There are definitively phases to it, and the desire to do so comes and goes, which was one of the reasons I decided to do it regularily so that I can hopefully keep the momentum and enjoyment going, but it is still interesting every time I re-discover it about myself.

The latest iteration of this process of discovery has been to finally start keeping a diary, so that I may for myself chronicle my moods and goings and through that hopefully better process things as well as give myself an opportunity to think things through. The process of putting something to paper is one that helps me actually take a deep dive into the matter instead of avoiding it.

Now this is already something I have at times done through this blog, but the nature of everything I post here being public necessarily both restricts what I want to say as well as forcing myself to speak about matters more circumspectly than when I am merely writing for myself and my own reference. Now, yes, the writing I do here is also mainly for my own benefit but it is still all public and consequently does need to have some consideration attached to what I end up saying, especially since humans are social animals and consequently what I think or feel about others might have an effect on them.

Another aspect of this iteration is, that it is for once a real life paper and pencil record for myself, and I have in recent times simply renewed my interest in somewhat old-school methods of communication and writing. There’s something about the idea of just having a handwritten book that just appeals to me, even if it is a lot less convenient and insecure—in the sense that it is probably a lot easier for someone close to me to get their hands on it and read it—than the digital alternative would be. But sitting down at my desk and taking a pen and writing down what I am thinking just feels more right for some reason, perhaps exactly because I already use the digital form of expression for other things or perhaps because I want to give those close to me the opportunity to see what was going on with me were something to go wrong—a consequence of watching to many crime dramas perhaps.

It’s somewhat amusing, I had been considering also taking up letter writing, since it seems to be somewhat of a lost art, and my mother recently found and went through some old letters left behind by her mother, and even though it was all somewhat mundane there was definitely a certain charm to seeing what someone was up to so long ago and retaining that little piece of history. So while I am definitely a child of the digital age and love technology and computers, sometimes it just feels more right to use older methods of communication so that there is a greater opportunity for it all to be studied and appreciated by posterity.

I’m noticing a certain pattern in my desires lately—writing, playing D&D, small forays into creating some digital art, more programming—and they all end up being outlets for me to in some form be creative and well, actually create something. This realisation doesn’t come as a complete surprise since these are all things I’ve wanted to be good at for a long time yet kind of always felt I wasn’t good enough to do, a common dilemma it feels for aspiring artists, but it still feels a bit interesting and somewhat scary to potentially start thinking of myself as a “creative type”—whatever that means in the end.

It’s also putting me face to face with my difficulties with, well difficulties and the failure that will inevitably rise from those and that one has to push past. I’m noticing a certain trend in myself of getting really excited about the concept of something, spending a small amount of time getting a very rough familiarity with that concept and then the surface level knowledge within an area—recent example being digital art—and after it gets difficult and I need to start actually practicing and refining my skill I kind of give up. I get the sense that anything for which I don’t notice something of a natural talent for, I subconciously categorize as too difficult and give up on it without giving myself the time to actually learn the subject at hand. Maybe it’s the age old thing of “everyone wants to know a foreign language/how to play an instrument/paint but nobody wants to learn how to do those things” at work, but at the same time in the realm of actual language learning I am doing somewhat well so obviously with the right conditions the capability and persistence from my part exists I just need to figure out how to channel it into other things.

In addition to this, also touching on the subject of motivation which I’ve discussed in other posts, I’m finding it a bit difficult at times to actually refine the concepts and ideas when it comes to things like D&D that I am already working on and are ongoing. Now I’ve mentioned it before that I have often felt that I was somewhat underprepared when going into our sessions and that had caused some level of anxiety for me going into those games, and though that anxiety has definitely lessened and I’m much more eager to get back to playing I still have the problem of having some very loose ideas where it is all going to go forward yet not really taking the time and doing the research necessary to actually feed those ideas until they are more solid as well as being able to present them properly.

Now in this instance there are of course a couple of caveats, namely that overpreparing can actually be somewhat harmful since in the medium in question telling the story is a group activity and if I try to prepare and solidify and predict too many things I might end up railroading the players to an unecessary degree which I don’t think is fun—I want to have the opportunity to be very surprised during our sessions too—and secondly, from the presentation standpoint, I’m actually doing well and don’t need the extra pressure and anxiety I’m causing myself, even if a desire to improve isn’t a bad thing either.

This all also becomes painfully obvious to me with my dream to write a novel, where I got really excited about the start, the initial concept, the rough sketch, yet I haven’t even managed to actually put a paragraph on (virtual) paper yet and actually started writing. I haven’t even started fleshing out those concepts, coming up with the world, the story or the goals, all I have so far is the start of a story. Now, to be fair, that is the general approach I take to e.g. these blogposts, where I have some very rough idea of what I want to write about and then flesh it all out as I go along and don’t look back, but I don’t think this is a sensible approach for the more longer form writing that a novel would be, possibly still appropriate for a short story or the like. Though, perhaps, why actually not? Why can’t I just start writing and discover the story myself as I go along, exploring the world I am creating while I am creating it? Editing is something very doable, if at a later date something doesn’t fit it can be removed or adapted, and then if nothing else it served as inspiration for what was to come. Why am I expecting myself to basically write the whole story out before actually, well, writing it? I don’t really need all of those tools that generally are there to make the writing process more efficient since I’m doing it really for nobody’s benefit but my own, so the pace of it all doesn’t matter in the least. I mean, I do hope to actually be done with it at some point, but that still a lot longer than even the slowest writing process I could conjure up would take for the task I have in mind.

So, I guess, even in this case, the thing keeping me from even getting started is the fear of not finishing it or it not being what I hope or dream it would be, either to me or others. Yet at the same time, if I keep so vehemently refusing to take those risks and actually working on things I want to see get done, none of those things will with certainty become what I want them to become, I’m not even giving my ideas the chance to flourish if I don’t execute on them. Maybe writing all of this down, once more, is a step towards actually starting to realize more of my ideas?