I suppose it never really occurred to me that 2016 wasn't supposed to be my best year.Maybe I'm an optimist, or perhaps it's something a little darker; a constant one-upmanship we are driven by daily as if our past selves are our present selves' competitors. Because what's the point in moving if you're not moving forward, right? It's funny how we read back to ourselves a narrative that's a millisecond ahead of our daily lives, trying to piece together what it all means so we might, too, be able to discern meaningful shapes in the mist of a foggy future. I'd forgotten it was simpler than that.Even what I've written above is messy and could use refining, but what's wild and a little rebellious to me now, is how I can suddenly see that I don't actually need to care. Imagine all the time and joy I've lost trying to make everything I do a masterpiece. Perhaps that old adage is true, and there's a real liberation in writing like nobody is reading. A sigh of relief where you can draw the curtain shut, lock the door and suddenly flail your limbs around expressively in the exhilarating way you've been aching to all day, yet would never be caught dead doing in public.I've been so shackled by the idea of the things I should be writing, that I've been ignoring my instinctive impulses of what I want to write, so have just written nothing at all. Because what's the point in moving if you're not moving forward, right? Wrong.If you wanna move, fucking move. Get up, get on down shimmy about the place and lose your fucking shit in all the wrong directions if you feel you wanna. Because it's only the track beneath your feet that tells you you're supposed to be running thattaway, and what does it mean if there's no-one in the bleachers anyway? Fuck that, I'm going to go roll in the daisy-dotted grass in the middle and do some handstands and shit.I feel like a lone survivor in the apocalypse of my own imagination, where I've killed off the majority of the cast of my ideas, and assassinated the interest of anyone left who wanted to watch too. The wind howls through my abandoned creative motivation, and like a thunderbolt of realisation, I can suddenly see how actually not shit it is to be unwatched. Now I'm driving a monster truck through the deserted shopping mall of my mind, looting the jewelry stores and throwing the diamonds in the fountain, making a human pyramid of American Apparel mannequins then bowling them down with a giant Frankenstein-esque sphere of mashed up Lush bath bombs because honestly why the fuck not. The last person on earth to care was me, and hallelujah, she's finally let go.At this point I feel inclined to mention that I've set myself a goal of writing 500 words a day and will be posting all on this blog, but I shan't be doing either. I'm just going to write the fuck out of whatever I feel inclined to do so and whenever, which means there's likely to be a patchwork of massively incoherent random snippets and essays and chapters popping up all over the place, which would be pretty unprofesh ~content~ if I wasn't literally just writing for my own sheer fucking THRILL.It's so crazy how we can sabotage something as beautifully magic as creativity and divine inspiration by trying to ram jam slam it into the pasta machine of convention so it comes out in neat little ravioli-shaped pieces of content.Today I felt overcome with desire to start writing about my time in New York as if it were a novel. I immediately jumped ready to guilt myself into refocusing my priorities, what are you going to do with it? Why not focus on your work assignments instead? What about all those other books you said you were going to start? And as I felt the familiar enthusiasm begin to drain in intensity like the flavor in a fresh piece of gum I thought NO! I don't care, I'm going to do it anyway. So I wrote out a couple hundred words on the train and I felt bloody good about it and it's currently lurking sneakily in a hyperlink beneath this entire sentence. Have I finally lost it? Probs, but this is the happiest I've felt all damn year.
