New York State Summer Writers Institute (NYSSWI): Voices In My Head
Day One.
I’m currently in Saratoga Springs, as a part of Skidmore College’s New York State Summer Writers Institute (NYSSWI). During my time here, I will be doing a lot of (you guessed it!) writing. All pieces produced during my time at NYSSWI will be available for paid subscribers only. Free subscribers will be receiving one post per week from me (either a gratitude journal or a penny post). If you would like to become a paid subscriber and receive all of my published writing, you may do so at the link below. My day one observations proceed.
The silence is louder here.
I’ve ascended to the third floor at Lucy Scribner Library at Skidmore College—the quiet floor—and nothing, absolutely nothing, emits sound up here. The only thing I hear is the echoed chirp of a bird outside, far removed from the comforting silence of a college campus’ library in the dead of summer. The quiet soaks into my brain, nesting there with the familiar voices in my head. It is rather frightening: your thoughts as the only sound available. No hum of the air conditioner. No muffled coughs or sneezes. No shuffling of shirts or shoes or seats. Just the voices in my head.
The people here with me spend a lot of time in their heads. They’re writers. They adorn their bodies with the evidence: piercings, Shakespearean tattoos, hair dyed in all colors of the rainbow. They are here to put ink on paper—manifest art from chopped trees—and their bodies feature the evidences of this pursuit; a different kind of ink, a different kind of flesh, yet pen and paper just the same.
Quiet echoes off of the walls of my head. It is eerie. I hear the voices loud and clear, mighty enough to force my hand to move, grab a pen, and open up to a fresh page, though hearing just them is a new experience. I have the urge to shout—push the voices from inside to outside—if only to have another available sound I can distract myself with. But this is the quiet floor.
No talking. Just writing.
A part of me fears drowning in the silence, accompanied by only the voices in my head. The fear is premature though, having arrived less than 24 hours ago, although I wouldn’t be opposed, on, say, day seventeen for example.
We are creatures in the same forest. Us writers. I have four piercings—all in my earlobes, two of which have closed up. I have zero tattoos, mostly because nothing has remained with me long enough to invite it to forever. I have never once died my hair, although I’ve chopped it all off, harassed it with boiling temperatures, and cut my own bangs in a college dorm room with shears from Staples. Outwardly, I may not appear the same as my fellow lion-tamers. But I spend a lot of time in my head, too.
Up there, it is both challenging and revelatory.
The voices lead me to darkness and light, nihilism and meaning, destruction and creation.
There is such a fear for us—all of the people who spend a lot of time in their solitudinous heads—that eventually we will either:
be so sickened by the confines of our respective minds that we will collapse within them or,
stop hearing voices entirely.
Eventually the voices we’ve gnawed on and gripped greedily, slapped our names on and mined with a rust-barren shovel will fall silent. Nothing will exist up there except for the echoes—deafening—of our pleas for more! more! more!
Even the birds will stop chirping, or, more likely, we will murder them for making noise that beleaguers our mute minds.
The fear, tattooed on our bones and pierced on every inch of available skin, is that our instruments will break. We won’t forget how to play, no, but they will break. Irreplaceable. Beyond repair. Permanent.
Our greatest fear is not that we will get lost within the voices, but that they will lose us. No longer bounce around in our heads. No longer stick like glue until transferred on an ink-stained page. No longer move us to enter into the beyond.
They will lose us and we will lose them.
To avoid the latter, do we have to accept the former? Do we become tortured to prevent ourselves from facing the harsher truth that we are worthless without the voices in our heads?
I’m projecting.
It is MY greatest fear as a writer. To write I need to hear the words inside my head. Listen to how they bounce and echo off of the walls, listen to their melody and their tune, listen to how they separate or join with others. I can’t type anything if nothing is being said. The voices tell me what to say. And at the risk of sounding psychologically deranged, I listen.
Without the voices—again, not mine—who am I? What do I have to say? What do I have to write? What do I have to share? Nothing. The answer is nothing. Without the voices: nothing.
I’d drown in the ocean of voices a thousand times, a million times, if it meant that I could remain in the water.
It is my biggest fear. It is why I, much of the time, can’t write anything down. Because if I don’t face the thing that scares me, the thing that paralyzes me, it doesn’t exist. I’ll look at the ocean from my spot on the warm, comforting sand, and pretend that I have no desire to wade in.
It is somehow easier to not write anything at all than to confront the fear that I will never write anything at all. A self-fulfilling prophecy. A self-fulfilling, self-sabotaging prophecy.
Help me transfer your voices to ink, dear ones. And promise me, if nothing else, that you will never leave me. Then I might be forced to scream at the top of my lungs on the quiet floor at the Lucy Scribner library and someone in a lab coat will ask me who told you to do that and I will have to say the voices in my head and all the sudden I’m not longer a writer at the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute but I’m a patient in a hospital of deafening silence.
Until then,
Kiera