Without the ability to write, I recede into the distance - it's long been apparent I am only capable of one form of communication, and this is it.
When I become aware of myself, I speak as little as possible, because I cannot abide the sound of my own voice. It disgusted me when I recorded myself reading at the age of eight and played it back. I think that was the moment when I first cowered back into the shadow of my own being, away from the light of others.
A person cannot be sustained on shadows alone - no man is an island, after all - so I make sorties out, but they are increasingly rare. Voice communication with others, outside of my job, is virtually nil.
The voice; my hostile, unshaven face staring back at me through the mirror; sitting on the toilet and filling the pan with shit, deep in thought. These attributes of the self are more often than not ungraspable - they slide away from view like different parts of the anatomy of a brightly-coloured fish: there the tail, there the fin, but seldom do we apprehend the whole, living entity. When we do, this is self-awareness: an idiot's voice propagating through a rotting carcass.
Without writing, then - committing the approximation of thoughts to paper within the limits imposed by the alphabet - I am nothing. Yet writing is difficult, and more so than usual in the last few weeks, few months. Yet I struggle on because the alternative is to be dumb, and ever-more reliant on my own insignificant mental apparatus.
Without writing, I am nothing, but I can't write because my head is full of irrelevant distractions spewed forth by the great God of the internet: newspaper articles, games, message boards, Lene Marlin; they eat my time, and force me to break the promises I make to myself. After fruitless hours reading the views of religious polemicists who haven't moved the opposite camp's viewpoint even a millimetre in their direction, I go to bed full of rage and disappointment, saying under my breath that tomorrow will be different.
Tomorrow I'll actually sit down and write, at least 700 or 800 words, without succumbing to the flashy, captivating websites that enthrall me so much. After ten years or more, tomorrow has still to arrive, and I poke listlessly through the cold embers of what I once called my ambition.
