The nervous system

People think writing is so easy. You just think the words in your head and put them on paper--as opposed to, say, visual art, in which you must first dream up a visual image and then summon complex, intricate muscle movements to bring it to actualization. In simpler words, people assume that in writing, there is no middle-man; that it is a simple input-output equation.
But in reality, it’s never that simple. Because in my brain I don’t always just think in words or complete phrases; there are complex feelings and colors and sounds and tastes that resonate in my skull and ask for translation onto paper. It’s sort of like the reverse of the nervous system. Normally, colors and sounds and tastes exist as energy in the external world, and your nervous system translates this energy into chemical messages for your brain to understand. In my case, I become the nervous system for the outside world. Inside my head, colors and images and sounds and moments and phrases echo back and forth as meaningless pieces of energy and electric impulses; but it is my task, as a writer, to translate these things into coherent verbal information.

I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that for some reason, I haven’t been writing as much as possible. I used to merely get the impulse and write immediately, even if it was a worthless whining poem or an over-intellectualized essay (like this). I have so many things I wish to write about, but it’s going to take some intense concentration and organization to write coherently. So many things pass through my periphery, and I want to write them all. But it takes time. I’m unworried. I am starting to feel more confidence in myself as a writer, though the struggle and the fear still persist. The struggle to make my brain sit still and write; the fear that I don’t have the talent to write. I battle them; they battle me; they battle each other. It will take time, like everything else. It’s taken hundreds and hundreds of blog entries and journal scribblings and awful teenage poems to reach the lucidity I claim now. I don’t regret a single angst-filled line, because every time I wrote, I understood something new about myself and the world; and ultimately, it’s made me a better writer.

The future is huge and luminescent. Anxiety is omnipresent.