Where we left in the beginning

It has been a while since I dragged myself to write any sentences removed from my immediate reality. I am writing this on a Sunday and I immediately feel the urge to stop. In the past three years, I’ve been approaching writing through the lens of a technical writer. The text should be bare and often without finesse. Vernacular, simple, and as-a-matter-of-fact sentences that are meant to communicate complex software instructions in clear and beginner-friendly steps.

After I resigned from a content writing job, I started out as a freelancer as a tech writer when the pandemic hit. Eventually, I worked for two SaaS companies where I pioneered the technical writer position for the team to which I was assigned. Both of those times, I dove in headfirst into the workload without any established process for my designated role. Test the tech, attend dev sprint demos, document change logs, and create user manuals. Workflows change unannounced according to priority. Patch updates and QA issues push back launch dates where delays are inevitable. Deadlines are always temporary.

In terms of writing materials, words become placeholders for an eventual feature update. Sentences become disposable — depreciated — where writing is primarily used to outline ideas. Editing is perpetual as software updates come endlessly. I consciously detached myself from the written word. In the following months, most if not all articles in the knowledge base need to be updated. Scrap out all things not needed anymore and replace them with new words, statements, and callouts.

At some point, I realized that I am working on a material that will be a constant work in progress. How some words expire in a given context almost felt too human. How skin’s epidermis flakes after it has served its purpose. How the brain purposefully forgets to make room for new memories. A type of positive decay that is necessary for survival, for one’s battle to strive for permanence.

On the atomic scale, everything becomes a dispensable cog. Aimlessly floating in space without a sense of purpose but self-preservation. An amorphous multilayer of paradoxes, incongruences, and dissonance. What I create and what I am become one of the same thing. Creativity is unnecessary. There is no poetry in this place.

The aftermath

I am still processing this feeling of resignation. I fear I might have become too complacent with where I am in life. I stopped going to therapy due to financial reasons and I have been living away from my family for two years now. I have made the conscious decision to drop my literary dreams for my own sanity. For almost five years, I pulled every atom in my body against my creative desires. I abandoned theory, art, and my creative circle to feed myself the mundane acts of just doing enough to live day after day.

Art became a distant place seen from the side mirror. A place where I look back only to see where I am going. A place whose soil is where I would plant my feet and prosper. Back then, it was clear to me that I belong in the crowd of the contemporary movement — the consciousness of my own generation basking in culture and life of the streets when the working class is in their restless sleep.

Working in the art industry and being involved with the art scene, got me disillusioned by the bourgeoise faux pas passion of the wealthy towards art. The disconnectedness of every critic and connoisseur’s jargon-filled speech amounts to a form of meaningless gibberish elevated by an overpriced admission fee. This cultish obsession left me with a feeling of insincere passion when the environment is paid for by the elite. The patron system and nepotism within the industry that criticism enables killed my passion to create something great for the sake of it. What came after was a series of realizations, which often felt like layers of rugs being pulled beneath my feet until the floor ceases to exist and nothing was left but me floating in an empty space.

For three years, I learned how to stand in that empty space. I hated every second of it.

No-place

That empty space, what I learned just recently, is still poetry. Perhaps this is another stage in rediscovering my love for writing. After how many years have gone by since my previous self-published work, I may have found the right time to start over. After experiencing writing materials that are dry and uncreative in nature, my head started to fill with unrealized ideas waiting to be born.

In one of my sessions with my therapist, I confessed that writing poetry felt like masking my inability to properly communicate myself to other people. Poetry for me became an excuse to self-isolate and place the burden of understanding on my readers. At the same time, creating a facade of meaning, where there isn’t in the first place. I deliberately refused to be understood and obfuscate meaningful expressions. I enjoyed saying nothing and everything all at once.

It was a necessary distance that I needed to clear my head and my heart. I have killed a lot of muses out of self-imposed rules that only make sense in my head.

I will continue to write here, where I will reclaim every bit of myself that I lost and rediscovered, which I owe to my old self.