Back to Basics

I need to get back to my basics. What brought me to the game four years ago was my basic need to express myself. This need developed from a feeling of silence that entered my life. Now four years from the birth of my greatest literary creation and a silence has some how returned.

The blame is all mine, as it was those years before the blog. There was a point where I wrote anything and now I write next to nothing. In between this was feelings, emotions, poetry, educational texts about Afro Latinos, and a bunch of vagueness.

So now I have to go back to basics. I started by writing this on a pad with a pen to remind myself that I am indeed a writer at heart. I have to get back the vagueness because anything more or less is just not acceptable to me. It took a mistake to recognize a power that I didn’t know I wielded. It took another mistake to recognize that all friendships are not created equally. It took yet another mistake to realize everything in my life is fragile.

Frustration is knowing that I cannot write the way I want without a certain sense of accountability. It is then that I remind myself that what I write has always been for me and yet (another mistake) there is a certain delusion in that. People will read and reading most times means judgment (not that this is a bad thing). But, what is written and published can stay forever and will always be up for interpretation.

It’s like when a Facebook post gets 80 likes and then gets deleted for some reason. Sure, you can delete the post but people know they read it and that type of literal memory can carry a lot of weight. So living and writing in a world of the vague has its benefits, even if no one knows what you are talking about (although, they think they do).

Getting back to basics mean getting in touch with myself. Being able to put aside those things I feel have kept me from being a better writer…and constant writer. Doing this will make me shift me priorities to what feels right for me. Writing just feels right. Conforming and acting the way people or society wants has never felt right.

It took four days of watching a slam poetry competition to realize the need to get back to the basic premise of scribbling thoughts on a pad. Now, I am working on a series of short shorties that may turn into something else…and while this is something that I have said before, I proved to myself last year that I can do exactly what I set out to do.