In love again… once again

Fooled you.

Haha. Sorry but this post won’t be filled with scribbles about that kind of love. But instead, you’ll find yourself reading about another kind of love. This morning, I stumbled upon some articles that I wrote when I was a freshman student and this one suddenly struck me. It reminded me why I started writing, why I kept writing, and why I still keep writing (or blogging for this matter. LOL.) A friend of mine has recently expressed her distaste for people who blog (or rather the blog entries that people post) but I am secure in my reason for blogging.

So…Happy reading. (^_____^)

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In Love Again (2004)

I do not write for glory, nor do I write for shame. But the reason that I write is to express the kaleidoscope of emotions raging a battle in the very depths of my soul. I write to find peace, to be able to sort out these emotions, and to be able to see them as concrete words and not as abstract, incomprehensible feelings.

I have been in love many times before. Not once, not twice, but a NUMBER of times, repeatedly and obsessively, pouring out everything I had into the current object of devotion.

Yes, I have been in love. But not with people. No. Instead, I have fallen head over heels with a number of crafts ranging from simple pencil drawings to the art of animation. And the list does not end nor limit itself with that. Just as a girl in her teens finds herself falling for a macho jock one minute and for a glasses-wearing intellectual the next, I also found myself wavering and bouncing from one form of art to
another. I have found myself devoting much of my time and mental and physical efforts first to simple line drawings, then to poster, watercolor, oil pastel, and charcoal paintings, and then, forgetting my love for color and vibrancy, I have also found myself lingering in the embrace of words which were colorful themselves though literally black and white. Forgetting my passion for the art, I found myself falling deeper and deeper in love with prose and poetry, with narrative and even plain essay writing. But though they say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, I found this sentimental saying to be absolutelyfalse.

For, as I was separated from my faithful pen, I began to lose interest in the art of creating pictures and color with words. Teachers no longer required any written creative output, school papers no longer desired my contributions, and friends and relatives no longer cared for my mini-masterpieces. Gradually, I began to fall away from the love of constructively interacting with words and I found myself as a mere consumer, and the only times that interacted with words were the times that I read and the times that I listened to other people talk.

Absence was not the sole contributor to my growing distattachment with words. Discouragement also separated me from the mixtures of adverbs, adjectives, nouns, and verbs that I had previously found comfort in. This discouragement was not in any direct form – most of the discouragements that I received were actually indirect and it was my own perception that made these things appear to be forms of discouragements.

I had come face to face with this form of discouragement before. The first was with my first infatuation (though I don’t really know which between the two – art and writing – was my first love, but since grabbing a pencil and drawing abstract shapes came before formulating creative sentence patterns in my life, let’s just say for now that art was my first love). When I first discovered that I had the passion for art, I began to try my hand at practically everything that I could get my hands on. I flattered myself into thinking that the portraits I made were good and that everything was in proportion with each other. I smiled when I saw how well the greens blended with the browns in the trees. I took pride in the way that the shading was captured in the charcoal paintings I created. And I did not stop with drawing and painting. My passion even turned to jewelry making.  But as soon as I saw that the artworks I created were nothing compared to the masterpieces of da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rafael, and even the modern day artists around me (artists that I knew and interacted with daily), the fire soon began to burn out and I left the love of art, feeling that I was not worthy enough to even hold a pencil, paintbrush, or palette.

It was no different from my relationship with pen and paper. From the moment that I could write, even before I knew the proper spelling of things, I began to construct my own picture books out of pieces of white paper, folded in half, and stapled at the “spine”. The stories I wrote ranged from chicks hatching out of shells to princesses riding off into the sunset with their beloved princes. I began dealing with stories that no longer needed any visual illustrations soon after that.

And, just like any high school romantic, I also tried my hand at constructing poetry about the paradoxes of love. I also found my niche in editorializing current events and writing feature stories out of practically everything and anything under the sun. And yet, as I began to compare my writings with those of famous writers who had lived before me, as I compared my half finished novels with their classic and best-selling ones, I began to feel as if I would never amount to anything. My words were colorful, but often they seemed to be too colorful, that, if I would remove all the adjectives in my writings, I would be left with absolutely nothing. It was as if my writings had no emotions, as if they were just there, prancing about the page like super models along a runway – showy, yet lifeless and devoid of any true emotions. I compared them to the writings of those long dead and yet still lived because of their novels, to the writings of people who were far away yet seemed so near because of the way they handled words, and even to the writings of my friends and classmates that were so moving and brutally honest that they deserved praise. I began to feel discouraged and felt as if I was being pulled away from the comfort of words. Not only did I feel as if I was being pulled away from them, I felt as if the words themselves were turning themselves against me, taunting me, and making me feel insecure.

And so I was pulled away from the things that I loved… absence and discouragement did the trick. I no longer desired to do anything else except to maintain a close and personal relationship with my new, and
yet everlasting Love – God, the Creator of all things, the One who loved me even before I learned to love Him, and the One who died just so that I would be able to live with Him in heaven.

Yet, as the days went by, I began to realize that simply loving Him was not enough. I needed to do something for Him, something that would praise and glorify the One who created all things great and small. So I began to rekindle the embers of my lost loves… lighting them one by one, creating a warm glow, and then nurturing a flame that, this time would not burn for the sake of burning, but instead would burn to provide light, to provide warmth, to glorify the Maker of all things. I slowly began to draw and sketch again. Gradually I began to renew my relationship with lights and shading. And then, because of certain inspirations, I began to slowly acquaint myself with words again, getting to know them little by little, and hesitantly studying how they interacted with each other.

This is one of the first steps that I am taking to the renewal of my friendship with words. I do not wish to rush into a passionate and selfish relationship with them wherein I would only write for the sake of writing or wherein I would write just so that people would know that I could write and do it well. Instead, I wish to gradually restore the love that I feel for words, but this time, I wish to use this love to glorify the Lord. I wish to use this love to give praise to Him, and to show the world just how much He means to me. I use this love that I have; I write with the said love, and with everything I do, with every piece of writing that I manifest, I do so in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

After an empty, loveless and lifeless period of time, I am in love again.

Written at: The Top Bunk at My Men’s Dorm Room