When I wrote my cover letter to apply for jobs in Europe I needed to be on the top of my game. Let all my writer’s mojo come out to show my potential employers that I was the guy they needed to hire. Who wouldn’t want to hire a creative, extrovert and well spoken web developer from South America?
Thanks to that cover letter and, of course, my undeniable technical and interpersonal skills; I am living the dream. I have a good job in a big multinational company, earning a nice salary and enjoying the city life of amazing Copenhagen, Denmark. Sounds great, no? And it is somewhat great. Somewhat.
I felt that I was missing something. The same something that bothered me every time I remembered I had a blog frozen in the cyberspace, floating towards oblivion. I was missing the fine art of writing. The thrill of hitting key after key on my laptop until that virtual blank page becomes something else. Until my soul pours out into the screen of someone out there in the world. I so fucking missed it!
But missing this craft, this art, hadn’t pushed me hard enough for me to lose the fear of the first sentence. And it had not only affected my blog. Most of all, it had neglected my most ambitious project: my novel.
Months had passed since I even thought about it. Almost a year went by and I hardly had gone pass the first 20 pages. A very eventful year, of course. So eventful that it seemed like the real novel developed in my everyday life rather than on the text processor.
Living such life has been hard. Adapting to a new country, a new culture, a new job and a language almost impossible to understand, while dealing with frustration, the challenges of a committed relationship and the search for a new social circle. You can imagine that writing on top of all that couldn’t be my first priority.
So that’s why this post, although not great, feels good for me. Not only because I’m shaking stagnation out of my system while bringing new life to my abandoned blog. No. The greatest satisfaction comes from the fact that this weekend I started working on my novel again. A book that might take a long time to become a finished work. But it’s work that doesn’t feel like it. Which, in the end, is the best of all jobs.
Nice work. It is so damn hard to just sit and write. Journals, blogs whatever seem to filter down into the slurry at the bottom of the day’s priorities : despite the fact that the reflective nature of writing actually is the process of extracting meaning or at least it’s shadow from the chaos. But it seems that always our lives entail splashing around on the pond’s surface, and so rarely do we dive down to find the treasure shining in the mud.
Very profound, Peter. But it’s true: writing is reflection and that goes against the busy lives society and the world in general dictates. Now the exercise is to find the time among that chaos to give a further meaning to our rather meaningless capitalist existences. That’s the real writer’s struggle.