a tangled swirl of words

 Dear Reader,

  How does one begin to write? Especially when one doesn't seem to have the words? I have the vaguest of notions of what I want the story to be, of what I want to say, but all my efforts seem to vanish the second I have to devise a turn of phrase to describe the situation. I can never seem to write more than a page at a time.

  I've always had a difficulty with words (this may surprise you, given my loquaciousness in this particular writing endeavor). Not so much how to use them, or even what they mean, but rather converting my thoughts and ideas into tangible language. How I got through senior year with all the papers I had to write, I'll never understand. Maybe it's because I had deadlines; but I digress. 

  To further elaborate, everything in my head seems to exist in a sort of constant, strange swirl, with every idea and thought and emotion liquid, one bleeding into the other, everything connected to everything other thing. Trying to give a voice to a singular idea is akin to comparing someone to a summer's day: overdone, cliched, and doesn't actually describe what I'm trying to say. All I have at my disposal is a vague, overdone simile that does nothing to describe my thought process or how I came to any of my conclusions or even what those conclusions are. It feels like no matter how hard I try I'll never be able to communicate anything important to the people I most wish to communicate with. I feel like I'm failing even as I write this.

  As you can probably guess, this affects every aspect of communication for me, speaking, writing, body language. Everything feels so hopelessly difficult to understand, translate, and interpret in both directions I'd really rather just not try, and rely on other people's words to speak for me. Maybe that's why I so enjoy a good quote. I can lean on someone else's work; it is perhaps a crutch, but it is one I feel I need. To speak (or write) with eloquence and conciseness and wit is a gift that I do not possess inherently. I may try occasionally--and succeed less often--but when I have not the capacity to try, I find it helpful to quiet my mind of trying and allow someone else's success be mine for a moment.

  There are a number of quotes that have proven helpful for me; Julian of Norwich's "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well" most especially. It has voiced a, well, not an optimism I practice, but rather a hope that even as I make mistakes it will somehow turn out in the end. More recently, Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers" quote has grown on me (mostly through extensive exposure to John Green's love of English soccer team AFC Wimbledon). And it is true, at least for me; hope really can be the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sometimes it even sings the tune without the words. It doesn't always "never stops at all," to complete the quote, at least not for me. Often I am not thinking about hope, even if my mind is perpetually on the future, on tomorrow, plotting and planning so that I can pretend to be a normal human being even as I constantly misinterpret other, so-called "fellow" humans; to quote Kafka, "I was ashamed when I realized life was a costume party; and I attended with my real face." And sometimes I'm asleep. But if there is an essence to humanity, hope must be a part of it; and if i am somehow truly human and not as alien as I so often feel, it, too, must be a part of me.

  And so I continue to write, and communicate with others, or at least attempt to do so, and sometimes I even succeed. Maybe my own words will never come as naturally to me as others' do. I may never publish anything more than this blog, and even then no one may read it. But I will continue to try. And isn't perseverance just as important a part of the human condition as hope?

  As always,

  Clara