I've been writing these posts nightly for close to eight months now, and I'm somewhat surprised that I've successfully kept up the habit, but I'm even more surprised that my list of things I want to at some point write about is far outpacing the speed at which I can write them.
When I decided to start doing this, I had two main incentives, both of which were purely practical rather than philosophical.
First, I was about to graduate college, and that meant I would likely never take a journalism class again in my life. Writing is something I've always enjoyed in my life, and I knew that if I didn't keep using the muscle, I would soon lose it. Writing at least something every night felt like a good way to keep the muscle strong.
Second, I didn't feel nearly as smart walking out of college as I thought I would walking into it. I'm not sure if the problem here was my expectations of college or my absorption of it, but if graduation day was foreseeably the end of my formal education, I was terrified, not because I craved more days in class, but because I wasn't even reasonably close to being the thinker I wanted to become. I didn't want to get complacent with my intellect. I thought writing every night would be a good way to ensure I didn't.
But as I've continued with this practice of moonlight writing, both of those reasons have taken a backseat to a much larger reason that at this point is the fuel that keeps the habit running: there's a comfort in feeling understood, be it by someone else or just to yourself.
I didn't feel particularly smart at Notre Dame. I fumbled my way through debates with my far more eloquent and well-thought friends, who could articulately weave through hours of complex Epicurean philosophy while I just tangled myself in half-pronounced words. I held far too long to an ancient high-schoolian belief that nobody wanted to hear me talk about nerdy things that riled me up, and so I didn't. And in general I've always just struggled to find other people who got excited about the same things I got excited about, and that may have led me to keep those left-field interests on a shorter leash than they needed to be.
I made plenty of amazing friends at Notre Dame, but that doesn't mean I always felt understood.
These posts repair that for me. They give me a chance to take the ingredients of an idea I know I wanted to articulate at some point in the past and bake them in a way that actually makes sense to me. And maybe someone else reads them and they understand what I'm thinking too. It's a hard metric to measure — "how well you're understood" — but just knowing that these thoughts are recorded somewhere gives me a bit of that assurance.
I want to feel understood, and I think writing helps me get there.
Comentários