The Real Me

I can't write. I don't know how to write. When I'm writing, I feel like I have to trick myself. I have to pretend to be doing other things, like taking notes or making things up in my head, or just typing randomly whatever pops in there. When I like something that spins around in my head for a bit, whenever I try to set it down, it feels wrong, like a copy, and the real one exists somewhere else of in the ether. Notes just need to keep being refined and refined, and I never know when they are done. Whatever pops up as I type similarly lacks polish. When I try to writes something well, like sit down and really commit to writing something well, the first time, it is like trying to sigh-read a symphony for performance in front of 200 bodies. And they are all invisible. How nerve-racking is it to play for invisible people?

Last night, I was lying in bed and feeling blue, up late in the early morning after napping in the middle evening, and I had a head buzzing full of ideas and words that I was too tired to take down (besides the computer was off) and I was working on a story and liking it and feeling good before finally forcing myself to sleep, and then I woke up and my dream-mind was gone and it was boring old immobile me to greet me again, and I tried to write the words the way I thought they had to be written and it didn't work and I felt disheartened again, all over, just like I knew, while laying there on the other side, just as I knew I would be. The real me, or false me that sits in for me when I am awake and rested, just cannot do it. He is paralyzed and fearful. Perhaps the me that fades in in early morning waking hours when my body pulls towards sleep, perhaps he is only a phantom. Perhaps he is not as clever as he thinks he is, as he has convinced the rested mind to think he is. Perhaps what he thinks he thinks is clever just just a result of absent critical faculties, eaten up by dream logic. Perhaps there is no me that knows how to do this. But the glimpses, the feelings of fluency, they make me so happy, but the endless arid plains to wander through to reach the mirages, they are unbearable.