Evolution of thought on writing

June 2025: i think we should never have an answer when we write; never, not preemptively. whenever i think i want to write something and i hear sentences in my mind and i type them up they don’t sound the same anymore and so i delete them and start again, so maybe that’s why Lauren tells me to write with my eyes closed. maybe that’s how you can really write what you mean to write. i don’t like the idea that “writing is jotting down thoughts”. well yes these are thoughts but they are more than that. they are facts, they are beings, they are times and independent creatures that are way out of bounds and reach of what the so called thinking humans can touch let alone grasp and write down. lauren calls them thoughts tho. i think in his context it is fine. what you wrote down was thoughts. when you explain it to other people it’s thoughts. but in the moment they aren’t. i think about when he wrote about editing ones work. i still don’t fully understand what he is saying. writing preserves memory. writing doesn’t preserve the past bit of self. writing allows revisiting of thought—revisiting of the following of a certain something. you are different though. i don’t know where im going with this. but i like treating these as detached and independent creatures such that when i read back to them instead of revisiting the exact same line of thought i can see new things and write more. i think thats the point of writing. i think thats what lauren was talking about when he said cumulative present. catastrophic forgetting. is your wish to remember selfish or selfless? i sometimes think it’s selfless because you are trying to keep him alive for the sake of him even though it hurts. other times i think it’s for the sake of me. did you know that my val speech at graduation was exactly about this, the fine and tender and transient emotions you felt in a damp summer camp hallway or humid buzzing classroom that years later you can’t even fathom why you felt anything sitting there but in some moments a whiff or a certain streak of light could rekindle that dead body in you. but i don’t think such forgetting is ever catastrophic because if you forgot it you’d never know that it was there. salingers oranges. hutch said that feelings always stay though. it’s not something you remember or forget. and the world was never complete to begin with. maybe it’s not that deep after all. it’s most catastrophic when i forget where i left my prox. it’s most catastrophic when i snooze my alarm eight times. ============================ June 2026: days feel long here. i was speaking into my phone last night about the meaning of writing and to find an audience. that i stopped journaling partly because i struggled to know who i was writing for. i think there’s a distinction between writing for someone and writing to someone–the action of writing being endowed a meaning versus the words and content being endowed a meaning. i think this year somehow, with lauren and everything, i have came to the habit of writing with a specific second-person you in mind. impersonal you but i feel in my writing that it is for someone to read, which is arguably better than when i journaled and didn’t know the reason why i’d document ephemeral emotions that would otherwise be meaningless. he said helen you are just scared of never being able to feel the same things again so i guess i was writing to make sure i don’t forget such feelings, and that i was writing for the future me to read but writing to no one. that makes the process of writing quite treacherous. do i still write with this purpose? i think yes. although i’ve endowed more upon the action of writing itself, although i write less about the emotions or the beautifications of emotions or memories themselves, i think i have implicitly started to write in such a way that the words and cadences would naturally hold some thought and emotion. such is the power of words and we should exploits this power. i want to read a literate passion, the collection of letters between anais nin and henry miller. i am also not the most truthful when i write when i imagine a future me would read it or that an all knowing arbitrator like fate would be reading my words, so certain thoughts and memories that i know would fade if not documented or intombed do indeed just die, so such a way of implicit burying is almost a sneaky cheating way of trying to leave my future self a hint of what could have been happening back then. the fox is the totem of the author says the paper in my bag which i got two winters ago. im sure the author meant something else but i take it this way–always hiding, always running away from something and words are the only way to try to approach it. and i am now merely hoping to uncover certain things when i write, hoping. =========================== July 2026: sometimes i realize i write to find assurance from within myself, from between the words that come streaming out of my fingers that don’t have time to pause for thinking, and somehow in this lack of double thinking when i read back i am looking for traces of proof of oh she is smart she is happy she is confident she is lively. but i wonder if this is an act of dishonesty to myself, and act of utilization. sometimes i fear lost potential as people say you could be so much more. and then i fear the loss of this version of myself. but then at other moments i wonder how much truth is in those words. i think more weight should be put into words that are spoken. which i need to work on. words are spells! i wish my brain could slow down! i want to curate my brain. lyricism of shakespearian language. tempests and “thou”. i think rounder vowels map to rounder intentions.