From Out of the Matter and Onto the Net

Writers are creatures of duality. On the surface, we seem as normal, healthy, functioning members of society. We go to jobs, we love our families, hang out with friends, pay our taxes and enjoy the most microscopic of life's little pleasures whenever we can. Yet scratch the surface, and you will find that the mind of a writer is constantly working in a world quite different from the one of the body. For even as we function in the normal corporeal world, our minds work furiously on crafting realities of their own imaginations. Bits and components of our life experiences are broken down, scrutinized, and cannibalized to form the mortar of a world we create all within our minds. It is in these worlds that the writer creates life: and for that life the experiences that go with them. As we progress and mature, suffer heartache and headache, pleasure and pain, they do as well. It is a world the writer needs to be connected to in order to survive. To everyone else, it is a world totally of the imagination, but for the writer it is as alive and tangible as any other.

The problem with this world is that it becomes overcrowded so easily. We only have so much mental landscape at our disposal before it becomes necessary to turn our denizens and their homes and worldly possessions into the curves of an ink line or the rapid tapping of keystrokes. It is a strange, therapeutic ritual that eases the mind and yet stimulates it to make new creations. So even in their work, writers live in duality.

That is the way it feels as I write this post. There is so much I wish to say, yet I feel conflicted in how to say it. Like the exclusive group I have talked of, I too live in two worlds: my mind standing as a gateway between the reality of my being, and the reality of my imagination. Yet, I do not know if I have yet to earn the right to include myself in that special group.

Writing has been a part of me since I was old enough to pick up a pencil and put thought onto paper. My fondest, early memories are of lazy summer days, scribbling fan fictions and original works years before I would even know the words "fan fiction", "rewrites", and "outlines". All I knew was that my mind existed in another world, and that my eyes were always focused on two images at once: both as real as could be. Today, though I am more rooted and aware of which is real and which is fantasy, I cannot live in one without acknowledging my citizenship in the other.

For reasons as yet unknown to myself, I find myself sharing what has always been a private and personal journey. First, with my friends. And now, with you, dear readers in parts unknown, who I may never know except from the writings and musings of your souls. Perhaps it is from the most basic and selfish instinct that all writers feel: the instinct to write. The need to be heard.

Here are my words. Let them be heard.