It's been a while, hasn't it? An appallingly long while, actually; over a month of radio silence. I'm sorry for the delay--as much as I like writing, I get blocked the same as anyone else.
Some of this block I could blame on the nature of travelling and my own character. I'm horrible with maintaining blogs and diaries and whatnot (those of you who followed Adventures of a Goliard during its brief stint can attest, I'm sure) and I get so caught up in living that I forget to record it. Some might say this is a virtue, and a refreshing break from my generation's dependency on photographs and social media to track our lives. How wonderful that I feel the air move in and out of my lungs rather than capturing it! Yada yada. (However, I don't think I'll be thinking that way in a year or seventy when I'm trying to remember what eyes 21-year old Lindsay looked through.) So. Yes, I do have a complicated relationship with deadlines, and I do get blocked. How very literary of me. Blame: placed.
If I were to be honest, however, I would have to admit that a great deal of this block comes from a place of fear. This fear has two opposing and yet equally intimidating halves, like two sides of The Coin From Hell.
The first part comes from my own fear of the void. I find myself asking huge, choking 3am questions like, What if nothing I even write on here matters? Am I just a ridiculously entitled kid who writes things on The Internet? Rambling on about "material culture" and "object-dependency" and things that don't really have anything to do with anything other than her own obsessions? Is anyone listening? And would it matter if they were?
Yeeeesh. Nothing like "what if" to block the creative juices.
The rest of the fear, and perhaps this is the more stifling part, comes from the worry that someone actually is listening. That what I'm working on does matter. And that the things I spill out weekly on a blog, records of work I put my heart and soul into, just don't cut it. I have been incredibly blessed to have the Watson awarded to me, and I am the recipient of enormous privilege. That privilege is heavy, and it has been weighing me down. So, from here stem a month of radio silence and crushing writer's block.
But all hope is not lost! There's a song I've been listening to recently (read: blasting on repeat) called "I Say Fever" by Ramona Falls. The story's a bit weird and hard to follow, but suffice it to say the man loses his dream because he chooses inaction out of fear.
Well.
And the lesson he learns? "I try to decide what to do now based on love, not fear."
Well.
I've always been a big believer in letting music inspire me.
So on the menu in the near future, coming your way from a semi-adult in Spain, are Leon! Lugo! Santiago de Compostela! Salamanca! and Cordoba! It won't be all at once, and I can't promise that now I'll get everything all on time forever and always. I'm as much a work-in-progress as this project. But I'm in love with what I do, so the choice is clear.
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