There is an invisible wall around me, and I am often far too aware of it. I am aware of it because I am the one who built it. Why do I live with a threshold for everything? It’s because I understand my capacity for obsession, of how raw and innate it is if I let it loose. Most people have their obsessions dialled in for them. I have never experienced such a thing. If I put my mind to it, and it could be anything in the world, I become obsessed with it. I have lost myself in my mania for love, for a story it took two to write, and all they managed to do with it was give it an anticlimactic ending. My soul has an empty spot, as if a socket, where anything too precious to me fits and refuses to budge, like a ring that won’t come off. And so, by strategy, by design, I do not stand for anything. I know what it does to me. When I forget to keep myself in check, the reminder is not too far off.
Perhaps, that is why I can never meet people truly in the middle. There is always a smidge of an opening between us. And that is precisely why, as far as writing is concerned, I have stayed within the confines of these vignettes—but they are my weakness. I seem to get the closest to the inflexion point with them in how obsessive I am to writing them daily. Even if a day would have me move mountains, with calloused hands, I will write my words for the day. Just the other day, I began to work on an idea. It is far too irrelevant what the project was, but I could tell you that it was clear to me what path I was on in three days and three nights. I am a lump of clay; any belief that overstays its welcome consumes me. Any person, too.
I envy the entrepreneurs, the athletes, the composers, the madmen of the world, and history, simply because of this difference in us. Their fascination with one idea and, which is more, their relentless action towards its zenith is something I will never have because, without fail, I will stop myself from getting there.
But I have seen what happens; I have seen it all: the implosion, the loudness, the decimation. I could not wish that on my worst enemy. There is a limit to me, too. There is a line we draw, and then we swear to never cross it again.