THIS DELICATE FROTH

It's like an undertow, an inescapable wake, being invested too deeply in too many people. It's a perfectly natural thing for us to do, but there is nothing more stifling to the creative flow. Their words, their thoughts, their problems, their requests, their plans, even when it's pleasant, even when there's laughter and love, it scares away the magic. Groupings of people become their own organism. They pull you outside of yourself and into the collective beast. Or another way I often like to think about it is that I'm desperately trying to dive deeper and deeper, but the more I'm invested in people, the more buoyant I become, and the more they simply drag me right back up the surface. But here's the bitch of it: Those times in my life when I have been mostly alone, traveling quietly on my own terms, I found that there was little usable material. There was nothing to press up against, to fight against, there was no energy, no flame. It has taken me a lifetime to come to terms with this dilemma, to become in tune with it enough to know when I need a charge from humanity and when I've had my fill. And this is not a callused stance. I've found that I can love people just as much, if not more, from afar. For me, the challenge of writing has never been about learning how to write, it's about learning how to work yourself up into a particular state and then being able to protect it long enough to have it work for you. Seriously, I don't even consider myself a writer. I only write because I don't know what else to do. It has almost nothing to do with writing. It's about this froth, you know, whipping yourself up into this delicate froth.