Please feel free to share or re-publish the following essay with credit and a link back here, according to the Creative Commons license.
(Photo by Dave Hull, used with CC permission)
In mid-2012, after a couple years of fairly consistent and productive creative writing activity, I almost stopped writing altogether. I suddenly began to feel that my perceptions were changing too rapidly to make any concrete statements about my personal experiences. Even some pieces I wrote in early 2012 started to feel embarrassing, while many essays and stories I composed half a decade ago had become totally unrecognizable as my own work.
At first I thought the lull in activity was due more to my recent move to a new place, combined with my difficulty covering basic life expenses. These have surely made it harder to get back to work on my first book manuscript after a life-shattering illness in 2011. But another reason for the delay is that I’m testing my budding personal philosophy – laid out in my manuscript in abstract form – for effectiveness in the applied realm of real life. And this year, at least, my perceptions have seemed very untrustworthy – my beliefs, constantly in flux. So I began to wonder if I would ever be able to write anything again.
