Rebuild

A lot can be lost when you focus so intently on connecting and integrating. Even with the best of intentions, when you spread your attention across the far reaches of the social mediaverse, a part of your soul is always locked up far away from you. I came to a place where I had to call all of it back.

In the past year, I have written maybe twice. That’s just piss-poor. I can’t live like that – my brain will dry up like a mushroom and rattle around during the commute to work. Now that I am closing in on forty, a reprioritization seemed to be necessary. I wanted to conserve and focus my attention on important aspects of my creative life. In order to get things back on track, I had to reduce my massive e-footprint.

Some stuff was easy. Twitter. God, I hate Twitter. The electronic analog to playing fetch with a short, crappy stick. I didn’t ever warm up to Google+ either, so that was a quick close. LinkedIn? Useless, unless you want to know where people who quit your company went in order to reclaim their sanity.

Facebook was a bit trickier. On one hand, I wanted to share the little daily wins and foibles with my close friends and family, but in another sense, that was exactly what I was trying to stop myself from doing. The entire problem was that I was constantly reporting on the minutiae of the day without allowing time for reflection on what those tiny moments meant or added up to. So I downloaded all my data and closed that account too.

I also have changed the way I read news. I had a large number of news sites in Google Reader, which was helpful in keeping up with all the day’s happenings. The problem was that I really don’t need to keep up with all the day’s happenings, dammit. But in order to maintain the reader at zero unread, I was forcing myself to gulp down massive amounts of feed whether or not I had the inclination to be hungry for it. My mind was growing fat on simple stories with little nutritional value.

I look back at some of my earlier posts, and I remember that I am occasionally a writer, sometimes a passable one. I aim to improve on that. Aside from posting here, I write nightly in a journal. It is a snazzy little pleather-bound number with a piece of elastic to keep it closed. I pretend I’m Ernest Hemingway in my shipboard bunk, but I’m probably more like Gilbert Gottfried in a Kentucky Fried Chicken. In any case, the side of my brain that uses a hand to write ideas in script format was aching for exercise, and only now is it being satisfied.

I honestly don’t know how far this will go. I only concern myself with the process, and refine just the areas that I know will make me happy in the short term. My hope is that my hopes and experiences will be preserved in the struggle on the page, like some kind of writhing insect that gets trapped in amber, only to squeeze out of a too-small shell and escape until the next sap catches me at the wrong time. It might not be pretty, but at least I might outlast the dinosaurs.