Am I a Writer?

After my last post, I started to realize how much relief I feel when I post something. There is something cathartic about creation, about expression through some media, that I'm attracted to. I've always written songs, played music, danced, or written when times got tough. Suddenly, for whatever reason, I think I've convinced myself that I'm too busy to do those things anymore. Big mistake.

So now I find myself writing, and further, I find myself asking myself if I am "a writer," whatever that means. Not that I'll ever attempt to do anything with it, but the fact that writing is an incredible form of relief is a convincing enough argument for me to stick with it, at least casually. And as the next few weeks will be stressful indeed - papers upon papers, graduation anxiety, etc - you can bet I'll make a few more posts before the semester is out to help get away.

The recent stress in my life has led me to some new conclusions that I feel like I should try and talk about on here. I think I'll just make a list of things I've been thinking a lot about recently. I haven't had time to systematize it anyway, so it's all in there kinda haphazardly.

1) Some things in life are worth forgetting about. While there are lots of things that are worthy of dwelling over and systematically working through, I've discovered that sometimes it really is okay to just forget about some things. Some things are just too small and minor in the grander scheme of things to really stress about.

2) There are a whole plethora of things we simply can't know. God, Jesus, the afterlife, what other people are really thinking or motivated by, the future, etc. There are just so many things that fall outside of our human minds. Often times this means these things fall into the category of stuff worthy of forgetting about (or at least not dwelling over) and other times it means we should give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Regardless, it doesn't help to be pompous about everything and pretend like we're the epoch of wisdom. We're not.

3) It's okay to be different. Being a 22 year old male ballet dancer, a philosophy major, a liberal amidst a family of (mostly) intense conservatives, intensely questioning religion in a town - and family - of seriously serious Christian folk, and the like are OKAY! It's fine to be who I want to be as long as I've reflected upon that and know why I'm doing it. It's also important to maintain integrity and morality amidst these things, but a lot of things are just noise. And when other people try to question my life, I've gotten much more okay with writing them off.

4) People are just about the only things that matter to me. Friends and family. That's it. Screw religious dogma. Screw making money. If God truly is dead in the Nietzschian sense, then the only thing that CAN matter is other people. We make the darkness bearable. We bring light and joy to each other. We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams. Everything else just exists to either enable relationships between people or get in the way.

That's all the random ponderings I've got for now. Hope everyone is doing well and I look forward to writing and reading more on the blogosphere soon.