In Winter

Going to begin writing on this again. Feels like the right time to do it, in winter, when no one is watching. 

I like writing when no one is watching, especially in the winter time. 

Meaning, I like the feeling of writing completely freely, without any expectation. 

I would think a more well-known writer might feel some expectation, some way others want them to be. 

Now that it's winter, I realized I've finished a lot of writing over the past year or so. Stories and a book, which I think of as a nonfiction novel. Now I'm reading a lot. 

This winter, students have been asking what it feels like to be a writer, and I tell them I don't feel like a writer at all. And most definitely not an artist. This confuses them but it's definitely true. I have no real interest in being a writer - I do, however pretentious this might sound, have an interest in mind, consciousness, thought, emotions, reality, etc. I view writing just as a tool to explore these things. 

This is the period of time - the winter - when I most dislike going to my office and sitting there for what seems to be almost no reason, and which is, in actuality, no reason except a basic social construction we've all tacitly, begrudgingly agreed on. 

This is complicated by the understanding that it doesn't actually matter where I am, in the sense that wherever I am could be the place I just am, never in society actually, if I allow that to happen. 

In winter, I have to remind myself to allow myself to just experience the plain, basic weirdness of everything, including people, animals, plants. It's more difficult in winter to do this for me for some reason. 

In winter, I try not to think of society or culture very much. 

In winter, I try to see through those things, which are normally things that are immediately apparent as being artificial constructions. 

One thing I've been thinking in winter is that it's weird that a child becomes more and more aware of social roles and manners, etc, of all types, and then, possibly, as they grow up, begin to see through and wish to be beyond those things. 

Seeing that with my daughter to some degree. 

The days look cold and grey, the trees are bare and stab the sky, and there's a moon during the day - all seemingly like winter, but it's also very warm today, which is jarring. 

Students ask me a lot of questions about writing, and one thing I said recently was that at some point, probably mid-to-late twenties, I began to recognize a central problem in myself: I began writing because I knew I could (this understanding was very simple and clear, suddenly apparent one day, even if I wasn't necessarily "good" at it), and then, over some period of time in my twenties, I became confused, and my confusion stemmed from the idea that I couldn't tell why I was writing anymore. I saw a part of myself that was writing for recognition, and this bothered me a lot. People told me it shouldn't bother me, but it did. This part of me took over. So I quit writing for a while, abandoning all my old stuff, until I began to clarify the other part of me that wanted to write, which was a part of me that wanted to understand myself, others, and what was "true," though I use that word very loosely. It was after learning that, sometime in my early thirties, that I began writing again and writing in a completely different way, with this other thing as my intention. I don't know if it's true, but it seems to me that all of these things occurred, over many years, in winter.