On my writing

27.04.25

Writing this text is hard for me. Not because its topic is difficult. Not just because English is not my first language. Writing this text is hard for me because writing in general is a torture for me.

I could not yet put a finger on why exactly I do it, but everytime I want to put down more than two sentences on paper, I find myself physically fleeing my desk. By that I mean that I keep thinking about all the variations of the sentences I would like to write - feeling great about the wit and pathos they seem to have - but instead of writing them down, I walk around back and forth across my room. Once I sit down again to write all those phrases, my mind and memory are blank. I try to come up with new ones - and voila - there I am again, roaming around the room.

The above lines prove that I am slightly exaggerating. If my writing process was such a perfectly dysfunctional circle, I would not have been able to produce the text that I evidently just produced. Though it definitely is a repeating behaviour that I can only shortly escape. Then, I often write down some words, let them sit for a while, think about how to express the thought in a better way, delete some words, add some words, then proceed to the next few words (assuming that I still sit on my chair by then).

Now that I think of it, writing text for me is well captured by the image of trying to swim upriver - or better - trying to build a wooden construction in said river; where construction stands for the text and the river stands for my own stream of thought. I constantly have to hold my ground and not get carried away from where I wanted to build. Whenever I add something to the construction, parts of it drift away in the current. Maybe this image of building in the river is what writing is like to everyone. But if it is, I insist that there is a varying degree of river current for everyone. I refuse to believe that someone could write more than two books in their lifetime with the same chaotic, associative, self-adversarial thought process as mine.

This should not be that much of a deal. For most grown-ups, writing more than is needed to communicate on their jobs or with people they like (ideally both at once) is just a hobby. Unfortunately, it is a big deal for me. I studied philosophy.

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That pause should have been enough to evoke some stereotypical associations. "This person chose the wrong profession and realised it too late" might have been one of them. On that I strongly have to disagree. I find my occupation highly meaningful and would not exchange it for anything in the world. In my studies, I had excellent grades and recieved funding by the German Scholarship Foundation. But two or more years of solitary living due to Covid just after I moved to a new city and the growing awareness that I might still not be good enough to pursue my interests on an academic level have taken their toll on me. I spent one whole year writing my Master's Thesis on a certain topic in phenomenological methodology (apodictic justification in the representation of past experiences). With that I have lost all joy in writing and not written anything meaningful for the past two years. Not writing Essays or even the research proposal for a PhD basically brought my academic career to a halt. I still want to pursue it - its just that I do not have the energy to do the thing necessary for it: writing.

I would like to at least find a bit of joy in writing that allows me to cope with the torturous process behind it. This is why I started this log. Maybe this will be the first and last post in a long time. My life went into a different direction then, for better or worse. Otherwise expect to find texts on varying topics that motivate me enough to write a little. It could be that some texts will be in German - sorry for the exclusion caused by that.