supposed to be five minutes per day #1

... writing is always harder than you'd think

february 2 - 11

2/2

frustration; in an attempt to make myself feel better, at a moment of the year when everything is in progress, i tried to start a new project. my mind feels as tangled as the yarn that i haven’t been able to unravel after my last failed attempt. i asked my students to look at their phones and see it instead of the screen. they saw themselves, like looking in a mirror. then i asked them to look behind the screen, and one of them looked at the back of her reflection. this made sense to me, but even filtering yourself through the lens of strangeness that i’ve asked for makes them look differently. they notice the difficulty of writing when you know someone will read, it made their language more stilted, cautious. that’s sort of the idea, to be more cautious in the hopes that it will increase precision. but i think better writing comes from reckless abandon. the problem then is that i want to abandon myself to the wolves on my tshirt, i’m howling with frustration, from my own lack of patience. sometimes i read to make myself feel better, feel different, but this time it feels comparative. it feels like the characters, who live the same stories over and over again are like the stone edifices of a castle. jagged rocks against whom the waves break. reading is in itself a sort of abandon.