I’ve been thinking about getting back into writing lately. The trouble is, where to start? I decided to go with what I do best: story-telling. Toni Morrison said that writing is like a flood (quote below). To the onlooker, what’s happening looks out of the ordinary and it’s catastrophic for anything or anyone that gets in the way. For the body of water doing the flooding, though, it’s an act of remembrance. A river, then, isn’t flooding, but merely remembering where it once was.
Personally, I’ll do anything to avoid that remembering. I think that the most powerful onlooker is the voice that comes into one’s head when they actually sit down to write. This is the obnoxious fellow I named this blog after (by the way, I stole this name from Socrates) only questions what I’m doing, remembers every mistake I’ve made, and what is more, demands that we be friends. When I sit down to write, there’s always a voice urging me to go a different way.
The Obnoxious Fellow
Journal From High School
Socrates says that the urge to avoid oneself, to run from uncertainty, and the demand to think about what comes to mind, aren’t necessarily at odds. As long as one can be friends with the obnoxious fellow, as long as the two are able to talk, there can be a sense of harmony. The simple fact is that one must just be aware of the two voices, and to be aware, one first has to come home and face the fellow.
In looking through my high school journals, I realized that there was no better place to start remember how obnoxious I can be. The pages are filled with teenage poems full of existential angst, dramatic declarations of my own insecurity, and other free writing ramblings from class. What I had forgotten, though, was the authentic and creative writing voice that every now and then would find the courage to speak up, and find harmony with the anxious teen holding the pen.