iLiza's eyes

I haven't written in a while, until tonight. I had a fairly traumatic experience about two weeks ago. My computer crashed on News Years Eve--I sat there and watched dumbly as it erased 4 years of my life from itself. Good news was that I had backed up--but not since last February, and I hadn't backed up everything. I put in the CD on which I had saved all of my writing, and there was almost nothing there. I felt like Carrie Bradshaw on that episode of Sex and the City when her computer crashes. The episode ends with something like, "all we can do is breathe and reboot." That's true, that was all that there was left to do. But I was still devastated--even thinking about it now makes me sick to my stomach.

You know, writing is like painting in a lot of ways. A person can never merely reproduce a painting--either his own or anyone else's. Paintings come along in creative surges that must be seized by the artist and acted out before they disappear. The writer must do the same. For the writer, brilliance flickers rarely--words seem to fly out of no where and organize themselves with such clarity the writer needs to physically stop and get them down before they frustratingly disappear forever.

This is why I am so heartbroken over my irreplaceable loss. I cannot remember what it is that I wrote about in the last year, but I remember reading through it all some weeks ago and thinking that I still liked it.

So I haven't written because I am scared to write. I am scared not only by the tiny life crisis erupting in my head at this period of my life, but I am scared of deletion. I have always been afraid of things disappearing from my life, but now, perhaps, I am afraid that my thoughts will leave me too. That those precious moments of brilliance that I managed to take by the horns, my own thoughts, my own ideas, manifestations of my own brain, will be expunged from being. That this will all be deleted, sucked away, wasted by a little machine that arbitrarily decides when it's time to cleanse itself and start anew.

And perhaps it will be. But a true writer cannot help but write through fear. We're pretty used to it, afterall: flying words themselves are pretty scary.

posted by iliza @ 12:08 AM