After an endless winter, and a spring that consisted of a long series of wet and overcast days, this is the fifth day in a row that has arrived with bright evidence of the sun. I am in the grip of a strange desperation. Once I have come downstairs, and placed the water on to boil, I sit and commence to keyboard. There is a hidden force behind this impulse to text; a compulsion, an attempt to write myself to “wellness” and recovery.

On the positive side, this impulse to write has resulted in an unbroken string of 17 daily posts. Yes, on some of these I cribbed data from other sources. And some of them consist of older posts  slightly reworked with minimal actual change to the text. Still, I remain somewhat gobsmacked that I have managed to accomplish so much. I am motivated to do more, to continue the trend and to attempt consecutive posts for the rest of the month.

On the negative side, this activity appears to have a dark side. I cling to the act of text creation with a kind of quiet desperation. I keyboard from waking until bedtime with little respite. I feel an urgency to make maximum use of the cool of the morning, the time when I still feel fresh and unfatigued.

My actions appear to be based on two self reinforcing beliefs.

The first is that I can somehow write my way to a better mental state. If only I can maintain this momentum then at the end of it there will be a rainbow. Beneath that rainbow there stands a fully recovered me. Each word brings me closer to that person. Each paragraph helps realize the aspiration of an uninjured self. Writing has become a means to force myself through to recovery. I have the belief that by making this effort, by sheer force of will, I can somehow overcome this ailment.

I feel a mistrust of the foregoing, as if I am grasping at straws that I desperately want to believe to be true. I have attached myself to an illusion and I cannot easily relinquish my grip.

Writing has also become a means to “write through” events, to gain insight, to place events in context. I value this aspect tremendously. I believe it led to the breakthrough understanding of childhood events and the manner in which these early events shaped my later life. I believe this has something to do with the capacity of the written word and how we, our species, develop our sense of rationality and logic.

The preceding paragraph is a doorway into a very complex topic. I have made notes on this thesis and want to develop posts on this topic at a later date. I need to think some more on this.

The truth of the foregoing just struck me. That I lack the time to think as I must devote so much time to writing. And here we shift into cataloguing the possible negatives of this blog.

I know that I write as it pacifies me in some way. This is not a matter of “relaxing,” of taking a break from an activity, or of shifting between action and recreation. It is more a case of being atop a volcano and using writing in an attempt to understand the turmoil experienced underfoot, an attempt to filter phenomena and place them in some catalogue of the mind, to ensure the epiphenomena are on the right shelf, in the correct row in the mental museum called consciousness.

I am not sure the foregoing will make sense to a reader. It somehow makes sense to me. It explains something of the sense of urgency and compulsion that I feel, that the writing is not purely a recreational leisure activity but is a response to some deep seated need, that it embodies all the pacifying qualities of a drug while at the same time delivering insight unavailable by any other means.

When I contemplate what I have just written I am struck by the thought of writing as a form of opiate, a means of escape and evasion. And I think back to my use of literature as a means of escape from a pained childhood. Today I have the problem that I cannot disappear into a book as easily as I once did  (I know as I have tried and failed). If I cannot escape to the world of the imagination by reading then I may have discovered the next best option – an escape into the imagination through writing.

The reason I accuse myself of escape is the enormous amount of time I devote to writing. I start as soon as I awake and continue through until sleep. There is much else that I should do. But I abandon those necessary tasks and focus on my work at the keyboard.

Writing is therefore understood as a strange amalgam of avoidance and escape combined with the development of realistic insight and rational comprehension. Writing is both a square and a circle. It is this conflicting conception that I am trying to unravel.

By writing about it.