On the Nature of Apologies

Gentlepeople of the Vox Chaotica Council!

Today I write to you, imposing retroactively continuity upon my blog.

In an attempt to sort through general displeasure with my life and the guilt of not keeping on task with my blog, I tried to restart my creative writing impulses by introducing a new blog called Apologies by Cutter. Now, if you were anything like high-school me you ocassionally read through dictionaries and thesauri to increase your vocabulary—you might recognise the name of my blog as a play on words:

a·pol·o·gy
əˈpäləjē • noun: apology; plural noun: apologies
3. a reasoned argument or writing in justification of something

In the first post there I summarise the idea for the blog:

I think altogether too much for my own good, and so I am trying to write my thoughts out to better understand them, and keep track of what I actually think about. Maybe it will also help me feel a bit less anxious, now my thoughts will have room to breathe and live and be challenged in the æther of the Internet. But perhaps most importantly, maybe they will make you think, and maybe you will challenge what I think, and then maybe we both can learn and grow.

There will be no set length, and perhaps no rhyme nor reason to which topics are brought up—or why they are, but I promise to make them as entertaining as I can. Check back weekly for my apologies, and feel free to contact me about any of them either through email or just commenting; but please do what you can to be respectful and focussed on creating useful discourse.

I am sorry I am so unsure how things will proceed.

And my first [editor’s callout: and only] post read thus:

On the Precipice

An apology on the nature of self, anxiety, and for the vast distances you can sometimes catch in my eyes.

I am sorry I am so distant. Sometimes I am afraid I am going to lose myself.

Imagine a vast ocean under the cover of slate grey clouds. They slowly churn and grow into dark, swollen thunderheads whose rain never falls. From the corner of your eye, you catch the flash of lightning somewhere within the gloom, but no thunder sounds, and the wind roiling in the heavens never deigns descend to you. At the horizon line, the grey gives way to the deep navy waves crashing over each other. Each is capped with a frothing crown, though they never quite reach the shore.

In fact, as you look around, there is no shore. You are surrounded by this empty sea and building storm on all sides; save the tall pillar of smoothed stone beneath your feet. Only flecks of spray and the gentle caress of the wind reach out to you from the elements, but this spire provides barely enough room to stay standing, motionless. If one of the waves were to grow… If the wind were to gain strength…

You dismiss these fear-driven fantasies—what point is there worrying about something you have no control over? Instead, you focus on keeping steady. Keep your balance. Keep still.

Don’t fall.

Don’t take that step.

Don’t let that sea swallow you whole.

You open your eyes. It wasn’t a dream—it’s never a dream. With a slight shake of the head you regain focus; no one noticed you leave. Their shadows still spill over the walls, and their voices slowly ebb back into audible range; tangled fragments of thirty different conversations tripping over each other, and emphasised at points with shouts of laughter or ice clinking against a glass or someone passing by you to get at the bowls of chips.

Looking out over all these familiar faces, you wonder what it’s like for them. Do they ever wonder what it would be like to step off that spire and finally return to the sea? Or is that vast, empty ocean just for you?

So many people tell you to just love yourself. Accept who you are, move forward, keep positive; as if you aren’t battling every day to just stay stable up on that spire. Until now you always manage to fight it back, but what if one day you don’t have the strength? How are you supposed to love something you have to struggle so hard to keep around? It doesn’t help that you are curious. Maybe the black depths are warm. Maybe the wind will carry you off to shore. Maybe there is a shore out there, and you have to brave the waters.

A single bead of sweat rolls down the side of your neck, and you realise you’ve had enough of this mandatory social interaction, so you wish your friend and host a happy birthday, and you drive home.

The lights on the freeway pass like the flashes of lightning over that sea.

This is a format that still intrigues me. I love finding stories to explain the abstract concepts living in my head, and it would be lovely to hear from you about yours. So here and there I may still write one of my Apologies, but I figure it’s been over a year and a half since I wrote my last one so it’s time for that blog to ascend past the Internet.

tl;dr - Cutter wanted to keep everything cohesive so he erased his post about shutting down Vox Chaotica and replaced it with the post he did for his “new blog“ Apologies by Cutter. It’s about how sometimes he feels isolated and afraid.