I prefer to think that I’ll never belong anywhere, even within myself. I find that, year after year, I keep coming back to the same sources of anxiety. The same questions. I’m at a place right now where writing as a dream is not appealing, because the road that I thought it would lead to, one of certain guarantees, seems a lot less guaranteed now. I have to trust my instincts, for without them, I am lost. Lost, lost.
The only thing which made writing palatable was the vision of a career path surrounding it. I’m struggling, now, to see that path as tenable. Not without comprising my core principles. Not without falling apart in the process. I’m on my way to something greater, but I feel the path collapsing. It’s in the darkness that we sometimes find our way the most. In uncertain times, it’s best to lean on Allah SWT for guidance and strength. Otherwise, we are utterly lost. Lost, lost.
I feel like I’ve said out loud all the things which could have been said in here, but I needed that conversation with a good friend to give me some guidance. It’s good to get some refraction, to keep you honest. Now I’m writing, which is good. I’m not sure what about, but I’m tense. Writing to avoiding not writing.
I don’t know what writing means to me and I don’t know how I feel about my future in this country. I guess the two are related. I’m unsure of how I’ll raise my children. Maybe I’ll be like other Somali parents and throw them in daycare. Maybe I’ll buck the trend.
I say I don’t relate to Somalis, but the truth is, I don’t relate to uncritical people. People don’t think about the choices they make, or the reasons beneath what they say. I meet people smarter than me all the time, and I don’t really engage with them intellectually. I kind of get self-conscious and shut down. My self-doubt manifests most when I’m tested by people who challenge my ideas. I turn tail and run. I’m not scared. I just don’t believe in myself enough to put up a fight.
On the other hand, I like thinking by myself, and I like engaging with people at my level. Generally speaking, I don’t like being challenged. I don’t like confrontation. I just like to keep the boat unrocked. Settled. So much of my life has been about feeling unsettled & dispossessed of self. I guess I need stability to help me feel like the world isn’t falling apart within me. There’s a lot I’m leaving out. I forgot what it means to be a writer. I’m a writer in a writing program who doesn’t feel like a writer.
If not now, when?
If not here, where?
I wonder what any of this means for my future. A future devoid of certainty, a certainty that I convinced myself of in my zealous attempts to believe this dream could sustain me. Writing feels like such a dirty word now. I conflate it with all the other things I hate about this graduate school experience. I’m making value judgements and interpretations. I’m taking logical leaps. I’m thinking from a place of emotion, not of logic, and I don’t care. I don’t give one care. I will double down on my old ways of thinking and behaving and doing because at least they brought me certainty.
What has all this constant questioning and re-evaluating brought me but confusion?
The west is fraught and I refuse to fall into their mind-traps. Time traps. My traps, have no definition, but I don’t care. I stay away from gyms and other houses of conspicuous vanity. My thoughts keep me honest, nowadays, but intellect is unreliable on its own. Thought without heart means naught. It amounts to nothing. Empty rhetoric. Empty inside; hollow and lost. Lost, lost.
The more I read, the more I see that my writing style doesn’t really have a definition. I’m not an academic writer; I don’t write criticism. I don’t write without thinking, either. My writing is a combination of irrational emotions and rational logic, though I tend to lean towards emotion. It’s poetic in the sense that it eludes definition and seems to be more amorphous than concrete. I don’t know if my ideas can stand up to scrutiny, per se, but I don’t think about that. I’m not making academic claims that need justification and evidence. I’m just telling you how I feel. I don’t give people an opportunity to scrutinize my feelings or the ideas related to them. My ideas are my ideas, as are my feelings, and I’m ok with that. I keep pushing.
Whatever it takes to push out the next word, line, page. Writing for the sake of writing and not caring about the outside world. That is my recipe and I’ll never get tired of eating spaghetti everyday. My writing used to bring me more comfort than a fresh plate of spaghetti, red sauce, hilib shiid-shiid. Ground beef.
Grind my writing down to a powder and see if you sneeze.
Grind me down like coffee beans and see if I can take a leap.
That leap of faith, the one that keeps me coming back to the thought of marriage as an escape. Can you ever really escape yourself? In someone else? What if two people get together to escape themselves? What then, and what of their children?
Look, I know I told you that asking questions in writing is unproductive, but I don’t care. I know the rules, but I don’t care. I know the game, I just can’t be bothered to play. White people give dogs treats in public coffee shops and expect me not to stare. I see the game, but why play?
The one question I have for myself is: have you lost your style and voice? Has this program made you become something you are not? Or is it that, even if not for this program, you’d find something to pin all your frustrations on to?
I don’t know, man. I just don’t care anymore. I don’t care about writing and half the time I don’t care about myself. That’s ok. This is temporary. Tomorrow the sun will come back out and I’ll be smiling, swerving on the freeway, head hanging out the sunroof. See the mid-day crescent moon.
Aruuuuuuu. Look at me howl, doe.
Let my goons swerve the Lambo.
40 Choppers like I’m Rambo.