Writing

Utterly terrifying.  Completely exhilarating.  Entirely fascinating.  Mind-numbingly boring.  Writing runs the gamut. And I think I've gone through all of these feelings on it.  When, the day before an assignment is due, I am forced to whip something together, I can hardly think of anything more stressful.  But when I sit down in the evening (or morning, or afternoon) to write a brief blog post, I find myself actually enjoying it.  Such a strange mix of feelings on what seems to be a single, rather one-dimensional topic.  But writing is so much more than that.  It is a way for people to express themselves without the immediate pressure of time constraints.  When talking, you can't pause for a minute to come up with the perfect word for the situation, or have the time to frame your thoughts coherently.  Writing gives you all of that.  And then some.  When you write a story, it's like reading.  I've found myself engrossed in the story so much that when I stop writing, I can't help wondering what will happen next.  It's a chance for my perfectionism to be expressed (in terms of finding the right words, phrases, and combinations thereof) and repressed (I don't have to know exactly where I'm going at a given point in time).  I am free to roam about the world I have created, setting myself on a crash course to an unknown destination.  Letting my fingers do the walking, expressing myself without fear of reprisals.  It's a freedom of a sort.
And yet it is also confining.  With only words to express my feelings and ideas, I am forced to compress gestures, images, and facial expressions into the simple letters, numbers, and punctuation I can actually type.  How is it possible to convey all of the information a person could want to in just a line of text?  Language is an amazing thing, but it is not all-powerful, all-expressive.  In the end, we all resort to some sort of face-to-face communication.
But even so, I find myself running back to the written page, as a form of both release and expression.

I'm grateful for writing, for the freedom it has shown me and the promises it holds.

(smile! :) )