Normally, by way of explanation, I would link the video that today’s blog title came from here. It’s usually just whatever song is stuck in my head when I sit down to blog. Sometimes, it relates to what I was planning on talking about, but most of the time it does not. It’s just whatever random bit of music is looping in my brain.

To be honest, a lot of the time I have no idea what I am going to talk about until I actually start writing, if then. Sometimes I don’t have a clue what I am going to write until I have written it.

Writing can be quite fun that way. It can be a voyage of self-discovery, where you find out what you think about something by writing about it. Far too many times, I have written a long bit about something or other in this space then sat back and said ‘Wow, I had no idea I felt that strongly about that thing. ‘

It’s a little crazy, but it’s a lot of fun.

There is something qualitatively different about writing down my thoughts as opposed to just thinking about stuff. It’s like each thought is at the top of a tall stack of thoughts, and writing one thought down causes the next to pop up into my consciousness.

It’s like Kleenex!

It’s curious how the act of writing the thought down makes all the difference. It’s like once it is written down, my brain recognizes that it doesn’t have to hold on to that thought any more because it’s now stored offsite, so to speak.

And that’s a powerful thing. Emotions are information, as I have said before. Ditto for our thoughts and opinions and so on. They remain in our minds until they are transmitted. Only when out cognitive hardware gets the “message received” signal can it let the emotion (or whatever) go and give you back the mental resources that said information was taking up.

I am pretty sure that the pleasure of unburdening yourself is largely a feeling akin to how it feels good to put a heavy burden down in the physical sense. It’s a combination of relief and release.

I feel like I have been trying to explain that to people for my entire life. But people get locked into the emotional-retentive cycle where the most important thing in the world is keeping the emotions in and from that point of view, letting them out in any form, no matter how therapeutic, is worse than madness. Worse than evil, even.

It’s The Worst Thing Possible, more or less.

And I know this because I am in that pickle myself. My whole mind is structured around this inane and damaging retention routine. I have a very deep (and very Freudian) terror of the things I am keeping in getting out.

And it’s all so pointless. I am a big believer in “better out than in” and that is especially true for emotions. People are way better off when they have enough emotional release to keep up with demand in their lives.

In fact, that might be the dividing line between the happy and the depressed right there. Happy people have enough release to keep the emotions from building up and taking up mental resources and making the mind too slow to balance its mood properly.

It’s like us depressed types are you elderly relative’s computer with all the toolbars and extensions and viruses that makes it run reeeeeealy slow.

In this metaphor, ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) works as a temporary fix for depression because it reboots the brain and, for a while at least, your mind is operating without all that extra junk loaded.

Sadly, more often than not, the patient’s brain gets really good at loading all that crap all over again really fast, so ECT does not always work in the long term.

Anyhow. Back to…. um…. whatever it was I was talking about!

Writing. Right. It is this release of thoughts and/or emotions and/or whatever that has made me ‘addicted” to blogging daily. I “need’ to blog because it is only via blogging that I can clear some space in my mind away from all the chatter of all those unexpressed thoughts all screaming for attention all at once.

In other writing news, I am a bit annoyed with myself for completely forgetting about NaNoWriMo (the National Novel Writing Month) this year. It happens every November and I have used it as a motivator for me to write a novel five or six times now.

But I totally blanked on it this year. Did not remember it until someone mentioned it on Facebook today. Even if I started tomorrow, I would have missed three full writing days, and so it would be a bit of a stretch to start now.

More importantly. I have absolutely no ideas about the project. Nothing. In previous years, I at least had some notion of what I wanted to write going in. I at least had some kind of starting point and a vague idea of theme.

But because I have given the whole thing zero thought until today. I got nuthin’. So I would be starting totally cold. And that would be a bitch.

Yet I am not giving up on the idea. I am not worried about making wordcount – I am highly prolific when motivated and so I know I can make up for lost time.

Heck, last year I upped it from 1667 words a day to 2000 words a day just to make the math easier to do.

So I know I can catch up. The question is whether I have an idea of what to write that I feel strongly enough about to actually write the damned thing.

There is also freelance work to consider. I was hoping to do more of it.

So I will mull it over. Maybe I will challenge myself to write a standard fiction novel, with no science fiction or fantasy elements at all.

If so…. it will probably get political.

We shall see. For now, I am just another obscure blogger.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.