Somewhere along the line I got lost. It happened some time after high school and before I joined the Navy. My whole young life had been driving towards the point where I would take up the mantle as world's greatest entertainer/storyteller and then, in a moment, I found myself locked in a game of chicken with oncoming reality. I flinched and dove off the side of the rode and became lost.
It is certainly one of the backdrops that formed my naval experience - the search for myself. What had worked so wonderfully for me in my high school years now felt like dead weight. I had been writing steadily since my sophomore year and had written more than a thousand pages of material. But it lacked... well, anything that resembled a fine quality. It was sophomoric, juvenile, amateurish (though quite a bit of fun). As a writer, I knew that to write more serious stuff, I needed to find a more serious me - the me that was lying just beneath the surface.
Only, I wasn't there. I dug down futher. I embraced my serious side. I became as much fun as a drying block of concrete - still nothing. I tried going the other direction, figuring that maybe I had just feigned being boring to throw off the pursuit. But in nights of debauchery and drunken rowdiness, I still didn't find myself. I tried the still of the night, walking along abandoned docks at three in the morning, watching the sun rise over Pearl Harbor - but found only lonliness and doubt. I tried insanity for a while, but it didn't stick. I tried cookies, but they didn't lure me in. I could hear my inner voice mocking me, but I couldn't find it.
Finally, I tried the one thing that should probably never work - I stopped looking. And there I was. Inside, comfortable with my skin, safe and secure and ready to work again.
Occassionally, I still try to pin myself down. What exactly do I mean when I say I mean it? Do I really believe in Jesus, for instance, or is that some sort of conditioning of my youth? There are plenty of thoughts that seem to contradict the notion - where do those thoughts come from? In fact, where do the thoughts that would indict me in any court of the land come from?
I can't help thinking these thoughts. They're in my inner voice, but I don't know who speaks them. When I buy a plane ticket, I am just dying to say, "Please don't fly us into a building." When I hear about a school massacre I just want to say, "Only thirty people? You were using the wrong kind of weapon - you weren't really trying." To my inner voice, these are funny. They are mocking, joking, a whistling in the dark. I know my inner voice doesn't mean them, but it says them all the same.
As a writer, I'm supposed to develop my own voice. But my own voice and I don't get along all that well. My own voice tries desperately to get me in trouble and as a result, my own voice is locked up inside and is not let loose. Sometimes I wonder, though, if that's wise. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better to say the things that I really want to say. It may not be the smartest thing I could do, but I wonder if it wouldn't be more real.
My inner voice is such a child and I feel reluctant to let it out because it might embarass me. But, maybe if I built it a safe little box for it to play in - something like a blog - it could get some air, meet some other people, maybe mellow out over time.
What I'd really like to do, of course, is send my inner voice off to charm school. But then I'd walk around confused all day as my inner voice spoke to me in a clipped and perfectly understandable British accent (since everything from England is cultured.) I am confused enough as it is.
Oh for the pleasure of dual personalities. I think I'd pick one that allowed my inner voice to speak - though I might then become the most reviled person in America.
I don't know where this blog is going today. Its rambling, but then so am I. Shut up now, inner voice! Its time to go back in the box.
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