If you’ve read any of these entries, you can clearly see that I am not a professional writer — but I aspire to be. In fact, in 2018 one of the reasons I continued this project was because I knew it would be a consistent reason to practice and refine not only my writing skills, but also my thought process. So, after Myesha finished, I intended 52Weeks development and my daily writing as tools to prepare for a perhaps imaginary career change from my technical background into a creative field.

This project is only a very small fraction of the thousands of words I write to myself every day; it is one of several creative projects I have going at any given time. I won’t bore you with the details, but I write tons. And I’m much more comfortable with the process than I used to be, so I’m happy all the practice has done its job.

But I still freak the fuck out about laying my thoughts out on this website for the world to see. I mean, people can be jerks in real life, so the level of impertinent criticism in the realm of thought exercises shouldn’t be unexpected — I’m okay with that part. What truly bothers me is the self-discovery required to come up with the words in the first place.

For example, consider a project I’ve been composing for at least three weeks. You don’t need to know anything about it, except that I’ve written WAY more to myself about writing it than I have actually written into the project itself. Way. More.

At first I thought the difficulty was in its composition — but that’s not why I’ve only written two paragraphs of that very personal essay. Judgment is not something I worry about anyway, because we all have our opinions, and they are worthless. None of us can perfectly define reality, so I don’t expect my thoughts to withstand honest inspection; they are just my thoughts.

No, my discomfort doesn’t come from my exposure to you, it comes from within. If I was as brilliant as her, maybe I would have started something like this project long ago so I could better reflect on who I used to be. I read it often as a reminder of how much my values have changed: they are far fewer and less important to me now.
Every day my awareness of that decay scares me, because I know the next thing I create will be more me and less connected to an existence whose worth to me is in continuous decline.

By my nature, the meaning in my words fades as I write more of them. I create, I change; I create more, I change more — and as I change, I diminish. So the way I see it, the more I write, the closer to nothingness and death I approach.

So what drives the writing?