Brace Yourself For Incoming Hasaam!

It was an action-packed breakfast ...

Well, honestly, that phrase popped into my head while I munched on my muesli and I just wanted to try it out. Nothing exploded, no Jehovah's Ninjas lept from the shadows to kidnap my wife, it was all in all a pretty standard breakfast.

Apologies, that wasn't building to anything either. I'm sure it could be labelled as some sort of clever literary technique, though!

"I'm back!" blogs always tend to go sort of meta, don't they? At least for me, they do. "I haven't been blogging in AGES, I'd like to reflect on WHY THAT IS ... " It has occurred to me that such reflections are not overally INTERESTING and leave me little room for creativity, as my life and imagination tend not to revolve around the fact that I didn't feel like taking a little snapshot of my mind and posting in on the internet for a while. Although, now that I've put it like THAT ...

I used to write GOOD. How do I know this? Cos 6 or 7 years ago when I was in high school (saying THAT makes me feel old) I used to write all the time. Assignment? Write the first thing that pops into your head and fix the grammar. Pissed off? Write a stream of gibberish, sometimes it would even rhyme! Bored? I would just instinctively scribble down whatever popped into my head. Later I could turn it into an essay or a short story for English, whatever.

The key word here being instinctive. I never thought about how unusual it was to write so damn much and to just enjoy it. I never realised how good it was for me psychologically to have such an expressive outlet. Just like the way I never noticed how physically fit I was back when I rode my bike everywhere (also mostly high school). I just did it, it was awesome, and the positive consequences of my actions would just sneak right in there without anybody patting me on the back for it.

What was I getting at? Oh yeah, the quality of my work in high school. I used to casually say it was relatively good - you know, good considering my background, good considering the fact that there were only 5 or 6 people who even CARED about doing really well in my year level, blah blah blah etc. But last month I moved house and yesterday I finally emptied out my old desk drawers and cupboards at my folks house. I saw some of my old work and you know what? It was JUST GOOD. Well thought-out, cohesive, entertaining, and clearly some effort had gone into it. Just as clearly, I had obviously been enjoying myself.


After I got to uni, I was so daunted by the notion of being surrounded by academics who used words just as big as I did that I naturally assumed I'd been a big fish in a small pond all through high school. I quickly forgot the fact that I got 100% for every single English SAC I did in year 12, instead choosing to focus on the aspect of my personality that saw me suffer a completely unexpected panic attack in the exam (for the record, this left me with a 35 raw for English, so that was one helluvan attack I reckon!) ...

I don't understand this habit of mine where I focus so hard on how much I suck. Actually, I don't suck. Not, "I don't suck 'that much'" - as it turns out, based on what I flicked through the other day, I clearly have the capacity to fully kick arse.

So I didn't get insane marks across the board in Japanese but you know what? I'd only MET three or four Japanese people in my entire life at that point and most of what I knew I'd learned over a couple of months reading books from the library. I moved on to straight Japanese manga and proceeded at a very slow but steady pace.

There's no reason I couldn't have just kept going with that, but then I got distracted. I got THINKY about everything. I met all these people who were much better than me, who'd had more experience and blah blah blah and while I was truly in awe of some of them, I don't believe I really drew on them that much for inspiration. No, they became excuses. "I'm not as good as him because I've never been to Japan" eventually became "I won't be any good UNTIL I go to Japan" and I poisoned my self esteem just a little more each time I gave it any thought. Eventually all I knew was the fact that I wasn't very good at stuff. And I stopped enjoying what I was doing, because all I could think about was how I wasn't very good at it.

Looking at my high school work, it almost felt like it had all been written by a completely different person. Of course I'm biased, but I felt like the person who wrote all that was kind of cool in his own strange little way. And he was going places. He did what he loved, he helped who he could and none of it ever held him back because he didn't get distracted easily. Once something was in his mind it would stay there until it was sorted out, simple as that.

This week's revelation was simple: There's absolutely no reason I can't be as straightforward as I used to be.