Or six months. Or one month, or even a week.

It's happened to me too many times to accurately count. And I'm sure it's happened to you - sitting down to write, extracting with great labor a gem of insight, and never being able to see it from the same angle again, no matter how much effort is made.

Every time I write something, from the half-assed attempts at a passing grade to the precision-engineered works of art, I look at it in a month and vomit a little in my metaphorical mouth. And for most of my life I dreaded this feeling. So I stopped writing, fearing it would be useless. Later on, as I scrolled through my journal I found the best thing I've ever written.

"My mind is a web of thoughts, ideas and concepts, all delicately interwoven in such a way that none can be isolated without destroying any sense of context it might have... which is why I cannot convey to you what I'm thinking or how I understand it. Without a complete explanation of everything that relates to a particular idea, it falls flat; it cannot stand without the support of the rest of the web. Trying to channel my thought process into a single dimension of language is like recording video with a paintbrush and a string."

There's simply nothing I can add or take away from this without cheapening its value, or worse, destroying it entirely.

Much like commented code, writing is a way to get the reader into your state of mind, and to acquaint them with not only why, but how you feel the way you do. And here, for what may be the first time, I've done that.

And now that I'm able to understand what the hell I'm talking about, it's time to work on getting other people to do so as well. You'd expect that to be common sense, but I am rarely blessed with such.

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