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Final skeletons
Aug. 21st, 2020 11:41 amThe funny thing about being a packrat, especially of the writer kind (and one who obsessively dates every journal and writing session entry at that) is that it really helps when one is trying to understand a much earlier point in their lives.
I say this because over the last few weeks, I'd gone through my poetry chapbooks and attempts at personal journals from my college years. I'm kind of doing it partly for a sense of long overdue closure. I've said before that the early 90s were some of the worst years for me emotionally and otherwise, for a multitude of reasons. Some of them my own making, some of them otherwise.
In this instance, whenever I looked at my poetry notebooks from around that time, I always noticed one particular thing that stuck out more than anything, even the words I wrote: I tore a lot of pages out. A lot of the poems were either rewrites (or longhand transcriptions in much cleaner penmanship), and later notebooks featured a lot of entries that were not in chronological order. I remember at the time that I'd been unhappy with the direction a few of the notebooks were going. But there had to be a much deeper reason than that.
So one of the things I did was create a chronology spreadsheet. Actually I expanded on one I already had, which I'd created for my Walk in Silence research, moving further into the 90s and even into the early 00s. I went that far because I wanted a bigger picture. I didn't want to just focus on the early part of the decade, but the latter half and into the next. What I found was that my poetry and song lyric creation came and went in waves -- I wrote a hell of a lot in 1997, for instance, which I'd nearly forgotten about, as I focus so much on the origins of the Bridgetown Trilogy from that time instead. It peters out about 2004, when a) I was focusing solely on the trilogy, b) I'd started my LiveJournal, and c) a lot of positive personal things were going on.
But back to the early 90s and those missing pages. They weren't missing, per se...like I said, I'm a packrat. I almost never purposely throw away my own writing, bad or painful as it may be. These missing pages were floating around in manila folders in various boxes and filing cabinets for years until the last couple of Great Spare Oom Purge And Cleanup sessions. They're now all safely in plastic sheet protectors and bound in cardstock report folders. I added those titles on the spreadsheet along with a few other personal events and music releases, and gave it the old Sort By Date click.
Looking at it all chronologically clarified and confirmed a lot of what I already knew: I was in a bad place emotionally, mostly of my own doing, and I was fighting it pretty damn hard. I let some of it out in my writing, but then I distanced myself from it by way of elimination. I don't think I was scared of what would come out of not fighting it...it was more that I was still firmly entrenched in not wanting to hurt other people in the process.
All that said...now that I've completed that little diversion, especially now that I'm in a much better and happier place, I can finally move forward, knowing that I can finally trust myself to do so. And that I can better understand when my priorities are a bit more important than others'.
And on a final note, I think I can finally start breaking through the creative block I've had over the last six months. But that's another post. ;-)
I say this because over the last few weeks, I'd gone through my poetry chapbooks and attempts at personal journals from my college years. I'm kind of doing it partly for a sense of long overdue closure. I've said before that the early 90s were some of the worst years for me emotionally and otherwise, for a multitude of reasons. Some of them my own making, some of them otherwise.
In this instance, whenever I looked at my poetry notebooks from around that time, I always noticed one particular thing that stuck out more than anything, even the words I wrote: I tore a lot of pages out. A lot of the poems were either rewrites (or longhand transcriptions in much cleaner penmanship), and later notebooks featured a lot of entries that were not in chronological order. I remember at the time that I'd been unhappy with the direction a few of the notebooks were going. But there had to be a much deeper reason than that.
So one of the things I did was create a chronology spreadsheet. Actually I expanded on one I already had, which I'd created for my Walk in Silence research, moving further into the 90s and even into the early 00s. I went that far because I wanted a bigger picture. I didn't want to just focus on the early part of the decade, but the latter half and into the next. What I found was that my poetry and song lyric creation came and went in waves -- I wrote a hell of a lot in 1997, for instance, which I'd nearly forgotten about, as I focus so much on the origins of the Bridgetown Trilogy from that time instead. It peters out about 2004, when a) I was focusing solely on the trilogy, b) I'd started my LiveJournal, and c) a lot of positive personal things were going on.
But back to the early 90s and those missing pages. They weren't missing, per se...like I said, I'm a packrat. I almost never purposely throw away my own writing, bad or painful as it may be. These missing pages were floating around in manila folders in various boxes and filing cabinets for years until the last couple of Great Spare Oom Purge And Cleanup sessions. They're now all safely in plastic sheet protectors and bound in cardstock report folders. I added those titles on the spreadsheet along with a few other personal events and music releases, and gave it the old Sort By Date click.
Looking at it all chronologically clarified and confirmed a lot of what I already knew: I was in a bad place emotionally, mostly of my own doing, and I was fighting it pretty damn hard. I let some of it out in my writing, but then I distanced myself from it by way of elimination. I don't think I was scared of what would come out of not fighting it...it was more that I was still firmly entrenched in not wanting to hurt other people in the process.
All that said...now that I've completed that little diversion, especially now that I'm in a much better and happier place, I can finally move forward, knowing that I can finally trust myself to do so. And that I can better understand when my priorities are a bit more important than others'.
And on a final note, I think I can finally start breaking through the creative block I've had over the last six months. But that's another post. ;-)
