please listen

I’m starting to realize that a lot of the time when I’m feeling down it comes from a place of not feeling listened to. Of trying and trying to talk and getting ignored, or interrupted, or given a fluff response because the person you are trying to talk to isn’t really listening. They are busy doing something, or thinking about something and to me it feels like they are literally saying, “This insert other thing is more important than what you are saying, it is more important than you.”

Now I know that sounds dramatic. And 99% of the time that is not what they mean. Trust me, I know because I’m guilty of it too. When I get home from work and my mom is just talking my ear off but I just want quiet, I am really not absorbing most of what she is saying. There is a lot of nodding along and yessing happening on my part too, which I definitely need to work on. But you see, my mom is different from me in the sense that she doesn’t acknowledge the need for space. She will just keep talking for the longest time not really noticing much or caring much what my responses are. Or maybe it just feels like that because I tend to just give her the responses she wants so that she’ll get off my back. Anyways, I’m about to fall into the complaining about my mother black hole which is not what I was going for with this post.

Like I was saying before, I’m different from my mom because even if I’m only half a sentence in and I realize the other person is not listening I just stop talking. I’m not going to waste my time. But at the same time, it is absolutely crushing to realize how little people care what you have to say. Sometimes they don’t even notice you stopped.

I’ve been trying to speak up for myself more. Like when my mom talks over me I’ll call her out on it. It didn’t work though. Now it just stings to have to make a fuss just to say whatever little thing I wanted to mention just to have her change right back to what she was talking about before as if I never said it. As if I might as well not have.

 

Sometimes when I feel like this it’s not even that I have anything important to say. No ground breaking news or anything. But aren’t my thoughts worth listening to?

Is it wrong to just want to feel heard?

 

One good thing that comes out of it is that it pushes me to write again. To get my thoughts out somehow, even if it’s to strangers instead of loved ones.

 

Thoughts on writing

When I started this blog I had all these big dreams of writing, don’t get me wrong they are still there… just not as strong. I almost wonder, what’s the point? Even if I write a book, which is assuming a lot, then there is the problem of publishing and selling  the book which most people aren’t successful for.  

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”

– Margaret Atwood

Back when I was all excited because I had just started and was writing regularly, I realized again how much writing helps me clear my mind and focus my thoughts. I used to write a diary and always found the same thing.  So if I know it is good for me and I’ll enjoy it, why is it that once the excitement wore off I stopped writing.  

I do that with a lot of things. Go gung ho right off the bat and then once the “newness” wears off I slowly, gradually, without realizing it lose momentum.  

I’m feeling lonely tonight and that’s when I feel most like I need to change.  Not change myself but my habits.  My loneliness, which I sometimes worry borders on depression, tends to motivate me to do great things.  Makes me shake things up and try something new or finally, finally finish that old thing I had been procrastinating on. That urge for change led me back to writing tonight so I have to thank it for that. 

I’m jealous of my boyfriend.  He’s been praying more lately and says his whole life feels better since. I know what that is like and yet it too somehow ended up on my list of things that lost momentum. I’m having trouble getting it back. 

I thought I would have trouble with writing tonight as well but I feel like I could write forever now that I’ve started.  Maybe it’s just fear of starting and it not going well all in my head. 

Is it sad that writing makes me feel better than 90% of the conversations I have with people.  It would be nice if other people understood the feeling. I’m already the dork who loves math and physics, might as well add on reading and writing. Make me a well rounded dork.  A well rounded dork who would rather read on the bus than talk to people and literally hopes she won’t see people she knows because other people wouldn’t understand that.  

I’ve realized I also get a lot of motivation from doing things with clubs and teams.  If I feel responsible to other people I’m way more likely to show up. Choirs, sports teams, and now organizing events at work.  I enjoy being busy with all these things but I get to a point where I am so busy and feel so responsible that I’m just flowing between all these things I’m responsible for. I think that’s overdoing it a little, I can’t put my finger on why. But the lack of decisions that need to be made when I’m in that mode is a giveaway that maybe I’m just running away from things instead of making the decision to go towards them.  

Researching Toads

​By 1984, I’d been avoiding my novel for a year or two. It seemed to me a risky venture. I’d read extensively in science fiction, speculative fiction, utopias and dystopias ever since my high school years in the 1950s, but I’d never written such a book. Was I up to it? The form was strewn with pitfalls, among them a tendency to sermonize, a veering into allegory and a lack of plausibility. If I was to create an imaginary garden I wanted the toads in it to be real. One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the “nightmare” of history, nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the Devil.

-Margaret Atwood

If you haven’t heard, Margaret Atwoods book, the Handmaids Tale, is being made into a tv show… on Hulu :(. Cause honestly who even has hulu. But if you’ve read the book then you are probably excited like me about the fact that it even is getting a show. I swear I’ll find a way to watch it. Got to make a friend who uses hulu.

But that is not what I’m writing about, that’s just how I found this quote. See Margaret Atwood wrote an article about the Handmaids Tale in the NY Times and as I was browsing around on the internet I stumbled into it. I left a link to it below if you want to read the whole thing. The super long quote i took from it which is above is what really hit me though.

See I want to write a book, as I’m sure many many of you other bloggers out there do. Thing is my original story idea had magic, and curses and all this crazy stuff in it. So even though I had a gut feeling about it being the book I wanted to write, I left it. I wasn’t happy eith what it was about so i just gave up for a good while.

That is I gave up until recently. I decided to take another crack at it recently and started trying to find out a way to translate the core of my story into the real world. It was like a puzzle or maybe more like a balancing act. I wanted to leave the main parts the same whiel at the same time stripping it of all its magic and giving ut more meaning. 

I finally figured out a way to do that but now I feel all the pressure of researching the millions of things that I don’t know about. Everytime I think of writing I realize yet another thing I should research first. Not that I hate research or anything. It is just I want every detail to be perfect before I start writing.

I’m just so busy trying to get all the toads in my imaginary garden to be real. Margaret Atwood gets it. And if she can get stuck for years stubbornly planning a book and have it turn out absolutely amazing then so can I. Looks like I’ve found a new role model.