This is my 11th post here. From 10 December to today, 9 mornings, 8 essays/short stories.
Several days ago I saw a post labeling people like me, who persist in‘Writing and Posting Everyday’, as‘rubbish-producers’. Though the protagonist of this post was of another type, I simply find this name biased, nonetheless apt and funny. Hence the name of this. It is somehow true for me: I have to admit that most of my work are, indeed, rubbish, though I have put in some effort polishing them. But being apprehensive towards the grueling task of refurbishing one piece of writing for days on end, my focus has been oriented to‘quantity’rather than‘quality’from the beginning. So I cannot blame myself for producing‘rubbish’: that’s what it would inevitably become.
Two years with minimal Chinese writing practice, two years with minimal chances to think in Chinese even, I know my writing could have been worded awkwardly and organised rigidly. I, too, longed to return to the fluidity of writing and thinking.
So I started producing all this‘rubbish’.
At this juncture, what fills me is not a sense of pride or achievement, but merely gratification. When I first came home, a week of sluggish activities made me doubt whether I would be able to live up to my own expectations, my own ambitions of‘leaving something at least’for this interval. My stamina was like a rubber band that had been pulled tight for three good months and the moment I stepped into our house, it was released and bounced to nowhere to be find. That distressed me. I thought I was not in control of myself. So that night in Beijing I said to myself, enough. Whatever rubbish may spew out of your fingers, at least put them down. Better than emptiness.
And I did it. And I know whatever they may appear to others, they are not rubbish to me.
It has been the most thrilling part throughout my little experiment - to finally return to the moment when an idea spark and I can’t help murmuring,‘That’s it. That’s the answer I was looking for’. My writing has always been an endeavor of‘looking for an answer from myself’. I talk to myself, argue with myself, force myself into a dead end of an alley way and struggle to lead myself out. The process wasn’t always pleasant, but the results were. I was compelled to ponder upon every otherwise nondescript details of my life and made something out of them. And it was fun. It was like I had a whole range of magic tricks within me and I didn’t know that until I pulled them out. It was like I had had answers to all my burning confusions and I couldn’t find them until I sat down, kept silent, and heard the voices deep within.
This 9 days - a slightly stressful period peppered with occasional, if not frequent, doses of excitement and satisfaction - might be my future routine. I don’t know whether it would suit me. I am still trying everything. I am still holding a kaleidoscope, trying to find a pattern that I truly love.
But now I see myself more clearly. I had always thought‘language and expression are indispensable to me’and‘building, destroying and reconstructing my understanding of the social milieu is the essence of my writing’. They were true, and will still be. But now I am honest with myself.
I want attention, too.
A prominent writer here says :‘To write something is to let people see it.’
It is. I want people to look at my writing. I want people to read, criticize and empathize with my writing. I want people to understand me. I want people to lift me out of my own echo chamber and bring me a broader perspective. I want to expand my sphere of living through penning down the inspirations that flashed through my mind. I am still not satisfied with hearing my own voices.
I want my voices to be heard.
With this self-recognition in mind, I could freely rejoice in every‘like’I had earned, pout at every rejection I had received. I don’t have to feign apathy; I don’t have to subdue my vanity.
I don’t want to write to please; I don’t want to distort my own ideas to cater to the taste of someone else. But I don’t want to live in vacuum either. Fortunately I have been able to write what I felt like writing and receive what I deserve.
A multitude of thanks to 简书, a place where my desire to talk is fulfilled without secluding me into a confined , lonely space,.This has been a place where diversity of expression is embraced. Here, everyone is a listener, and everyone can find his voice.
So let me start here. No more than 10 days left, I’ll see what I can churn out of my once parched earth in my brain.
I am still searching for more answers.
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