Aha

Yes yes writing is a strange and confusing thing to do.

I've begun my latest essay in earnest. I say 'latest essay' as if though I still pounded out essays like I did in the months and years immediately after finishing undergrad. I used to produce that ish, man. Sometimes I look at my output and I wonder how I did it.

It's not like it was even all bad writing!

I just reread my essay on nihilism, magic, and amusement and I wasn't even mad about it! I was totally engaging with a bunch of different thinkers, working through their ideas, trying to think along with them and draw some implications and clarity from it all.

Yet now I find myself being so much more careful, so measured in my writing. Doing proper footnotes, trying to sound proper and speak to an audience.

One thing that was affecting my writing in those first few years out of college was that I wasn't confronting the other things going on in my life. Namely, I wasn't confronting the complexity and, more so, the difficulty of my experiences with women. I was ignoring the fact that I was lonely. I think during much of my college career I lost touch with some of my emotions, especially those that have to do with intimacy and sex, knowing and being known.

At the end of 2012 I began to face those feelings more seriously. Mainly because my heart got broken. Mainly because it was exceedingly fragile. Anyone I cared for could have broken it. I just happened to place it in hands that weren't ready or willing to hold it. So naturally it fell, naturally it shattered.

SOMETHING SOMETHING GOTTA HEART OF GLASSSSSS.

I've very much worked on my resiliency, my robustness. My antifragility?

Yet the output of my writing has been affected by another factor: my rejection from graduate school and the pain it has caused me.

When I set out to write an essay for my graduate school applications I approached it quite seriously. I worked very hard on it, I tried to make it focused, diverse, rigorous. All this crap. I'm not sure how good that essay is. I know that it tried to do wayyyyy too much way to quickly. It embarrasses me that I submitted such a thing to the universities I wanted to go to.

Now I can't seem to engage in my attempts at scholarly work without some pain. I feel so inadequate. I feel like I've failed.

To render this in terms of perspective taking, it's as if I am observing all of my writing through the eyes of a generic academic who has refused me entry into the institutions.

Oh it hurts.

Haha. I don't know what to think. What to do.

I'm delighted that I've begun this essay that I'm working on. The title, you ask? Well, surely I'll share. Tentatively (but not really): "Matter and Mind in Strategic Education: Perspective Taking and Political Wisdom in the Philosophy of Carl von Clausewitz and R.G. Collingwood"

I love the phrase 'Matter and Mind in Strategic Education'. I like alliteration.

I think that matter and mind, too, are pretty fundamental categories that belong to science and the humanities, respectively.

Eh, that's all I've got, really.

I was just so amazed that as I was going through On War, looking for the proper evidence to show that Clausewitz's concerns were eminently practical, that I was so daunted, so pained for a moment. It is a daunting book, there is no doubt about that. But my pain isn't simply that the book is difficult. It is that I find my life difficult, I find my ambitions thwarted, my ego bruised, my current working situation counter to my feelings of who I am.

Hmm. What pleasure I take in writing what I wrote tonight. What pleasure I take in writing this now!

Ohhhh to try and find an avenue to think.

Ohhhhhhhh.

Oh.