The Particular Finest

Presented by aurynn shaw

202X

I used to write.

I used to have a space carved out in my life where words poured through nib gently rested upon smooth paper, and ink stained my fingers.

I used to have a space carved out in my life where words tremble into being, a gentle plastic click bringing them glowing to life on my screen.

I don’t write, anymore. I lost the space where I wrote when I moved to New Zealand a decade ago, when my back was injured and I couldn’t go to work anymore.

I wrote Contempt Culture to end an argument on Twitter, when people kept being Wrong and I was tired of the same arguments and the same poorly realised understanding that maybe I had a point. But I had a space to write, a place, a life, a

no

not a life

a me

a me that wrote, a time and a place and a being that could let words scream from her heart into the world and change everything.

I don’t write anymore.

The words still boil inside me, but I can’t find the space to let them carve the world.

I can’t find the place where the ink stains my soul and fades with tears.

I used to write.

My ideas are still there, thoughts and feelings and new understandings, everything I’ve learned in four years of thinking and reading on sociology, but it’s been a year and a half since I wrote anything on this blog, a year and a half since anything had the space to be said.

I used to write, and 18 months is a lot of writing I’ve not done and a mountain of words I cannot shovel fast enough to keep from drowning me in their relentless

burning

intensity.

I used to write. I don’t write anymore.

My crafted places for woven words are gone, and they are not coming back. I don’t remember how I found them the first time, and I

wish

I knew or remembered or felt

able

to search

and not be caught in my own head while I wish for what spaces once were.

I used to write.

Maybe I will again.