A Brain Crowded with Ideas and Absent of Focus

Today’s blog post is going to be pretty modest because I’m not sure what to write about. I have ideas swirling around in my mind, and tons of things I could write about, yet I’m somehow coming up empty for one main thing I want to delve into. See, I even included a picture of an empty notepad, shamelessly picked from a cursory Google Images search, to represent this post. Oh well. I’m just going to touch on some random things I’ve been up to and thinking about.

1. Recently my high school closed down, so I’m trying to tackle a big piece about what the school meant to me. I started writing it today and I was originally actually planning to use that as my post today. But I realized how hard it was to sum up four years, especially because those years were so huge for me—they were like a whole other life. It’s strange to think about those years as only a fifth of my 20-year life. It seems more like 45%, with college being another 35% and my pre-high school years being the 20% that I don’t remember as well and can’t analyze as deeply.

2. God, journaling is great. I’m perpetually behind in journaling because I write such verbose descriptions and it takes so long, but I’ve taken some time lately to catch up a little, and it’s been so rewarding. Seeing those pages full of text is nice to begin with, and having my stories out there in writing feels cathartic, even when they’re relatively mundane stories.

Whenever I’m feeling really bad about something, whatever it is, writing it out helps. It makes my emotions feel clearer and more logical. It helps me make sense of whatever confusing mix of emotions I might be feeling, and I’ve had a lot of that lately. As unhealthy as this sounds, I think I might start focusing more on journaling even if it means spending less time studying. It’s worth it for my mental health.

3. I’ve been thinking about one of the most differences between TV/film/novels and reality: reality doesn’t have as much big confrontations. That’s not to say there isn’t conflict in real life, of course, and in the right hands, the smallest of conflicts can become enthralling in writing or onscreen. It’s more to say that in real life, there are little simmering tensions and passive-aggressions, whereas movies use big, dramatic confrontations where all the emotions come out at once. Characters are dramatically brought together with grand romantic gestures and first kisses in the rain. They’re brought apart by cataclysmic shouting matches.

And sure, maybe I’m only describing the most melodramatic, cliché devices, but still, even the best stories have to fabricate big confrontations out of necessity. It’s just how things are; no one wants to see a romance movie where two best friends have feelings for each other but literally never act on them, instead just secretly pining away for each other, being jealous of each other’s partners, and slowly accepting that they’re never going to do anything about it out of fear that it’ll ruin the friendship. (I guess you could point to the general critical success of “Drinking Buddies” to prove me wrong, and good point, although I found the ending of that movie lacking for this precise reason: there’s no catharsis, and it doesn’t act on that building up of sexual tension.)

Good stories make a promise to the audience at the beginning—“this is going to blow up eventually”—and fulfill those promises. Aside from radical stories that purposely set out to subvert expectations, stories don’t tend to be set on ‘simmer’ the entire time. There has to be change.

I was thinking about this because of various times in my life when a confrontation seemed inevitable. To improve a certain friendship, I could’ve called out a friend for something shitty they did. To move past an object of my infatuation, I could’ve told her my feelings and accepted the result, whichever way it went. But so many times in my life, I’ve eschewed those big confrontations. Sometimes it probably would’ve been healthier to have those confrontations—but movies paint them as happening so much more often than they actually do. And honestly, sometimes I’m glad I didn’t confront somebody about something. Confrontation isn’t inherently the right choice. As unpleasant as it sounds, sometimes burying your feelings and letting them shrivel away can be the right choice. Especially as you get older and it becomes necessary to be a little fake once in a while.