Graphophobia

Long long time ago when I was a preteen, I wrote a poem

Белоснежный лист бумаги

Неисписанный ничем

Придающий мне отваги

Неизведанной совсем

Как бы я хотела дрогнуть

И оставить не тая

Белоснежный лист бумаги

Девственным таким же зря

Which boils down to English something like “an empty piece of paper gives me courage but I’d rather leave it uselessly empty still”

I definitely was not after any deep meaning — I was a preteen — I mostly worked my way after the rhymes, letting them come and guide the content — but it sums up nicely my relationship with writing.

I’m a graphophobe. More precisely would be something like a bipolar writing disorder but I don’t want to take mental health issues lightly — while my thing I’d like to take as light as possible. I’m afraid of writing. I mean, I’m addicted to writing, I write in my head almost nonstop but I’m absolutely panicky absurdly afraid of putting it all down. My concerns are many but here’s a few of them:

• once you start writing, it leads you away / distracts you from the original idea in your head and it takes immense concentration (at least for me) to follow the trail blessed by the Spirit. One time in my early twenties I spent the whole night as a vigil to labor out a poem. For it only to include an ingrown toenail. Yep, the Spirit told me it’s the best metaphor for the soul pain I was trying to describe;

• which leads me to my other concern: whatever beauty you have inside — once you take it outside it’s approximately as attractive as a jelly fish out of the water. Most of the time it’s a formless blob that no one is interested in seeing and you are forever pained by the vision that only you were blessed to see and by the absolute deafening solitude it brought with it;

• corollary to one but slightly different, words tend to trap you into a system: you’re suddenly trying to finish a circle/building of some sort instead of channeling the Spirit — and for that now you’re suddenly bending the truth you know/experience to fit into the expectations of those who’s reading;

• which leads me to the mirror fear: the primal threat of seeing yourself in others — what are they going to say? more importantly, what are they going to think? or totally crushingly, would they notice/care?

• which opens the door to the tremendous responsibility: is the text going to be still meaningful over the course of years? Will anyone look at it from the future and find it useful/attractive/thought provoking? Because otherwise, you’re forever failing — repeated like in a nested reflection, in years. Put it differently: would you be new Mark Aurelius?

And that’s just a few. To offset all of that dark side of the moon, there’s undeniable sweetness of writing. The joy of creating. The lightness of absolute possibility. The ultimate melody of freedom.

So, even it hurts, I come back here again and again, working against my own fear, to have some exposure therapy and write. Those on the receiving end: I thank you.