I have recently been gifted a few dozen pens—a whole pack of sleek-looking black ink pens, and there’s this little thing that I do always, where I never use just the one pen for everything I need to write. It’s good for organisation, that, but I’m not really an organised person. It’s more…to separate thoughts.
One pen for work, a few for writing in my notebook, one to carry in my bag just in case. I don’t like working with my writing pen. And I will not write with my work pen. It’s as if that ink was meant for certain words only, for another vocabulary entirely. Like, my writing pen, that is the pen for fantasy and escape, there lies in this still ink pages of yet unspoken thoughts and adventures, reveries yet to unfold—not work. And I always thought this was a little fussy of me. A little too “I’m a writer and I can only work in some very specific conditions”. I was scared of what it would make me look like, not of what it would make me. Until I read a piece, this week, about how the tools you use define what you make of and with them. The tool is part of the process, and so it is part of the results.
So maybe this is why my writing is so garbled and unfocused lately.
I have been mixing up pens and thoughts. Starting with my writing pen, following with a work pen, and then another unused one from the pile. No wonder that one moment, I am cool and collected in writing, then panicky and passionate, then scared and in awe the next.
I am mixing up worlds entirely.
Or maybe I am the one all mixed up in them.
Taking things, leaving back pieces of me, swapping parts of myself for something else, I don’t think I return everyday the same person I was before I left.
(And I’m still deciding whether that’s a good, bad or natural thing).
Note : This post is the first of 3 about liminal spaces coming this weekend. I hope you will like it 🙂 Also, the article I mentioned reading can be found here (although it’s in french, sorry! But just in case you do read french, well…)
Young Adult, Old Soul 