Blog 25-What keeps me from writing is the thing I must write about

Back in La Fabrica I sat on the edge of my hard chair, centered my laptop on my narrow table, and stared at the trunk of the coconut palm right in front of me. I was again saved from my writing by Guille who was just arriving with his huge ancient laptop under his arm. He came right up to me. “I was walking back from El Territorio and I walked right into a young woman I just took to Dona Patria in the Comedor. She was covered with bruises and couldn't remember what had happened to her.” Tears were flowing freely down Guille's sun burnt wrinkled cheeks, little rivulets in their own geology. “Los muchachos are going to have to expand their patrolling. I think I'll find them tonight and have a sit down with them. Why can't the predators prey on the Base instead ? Whoever los muchachos have working on turning the predators has to do better.” I listened to Guille's discurso on humans hurting humans until he was done. When we first met I was afraid of Guille, afraid that if I listened to him he'd never shut up. But one morning, the one when he first told me of the predators who had been Guardias and were the best trained trackers around, trackers of the dark side he called them, who kidnapped encampers and in exchange for their release extorted their families in the City out of their last pennies, I gave in, stopped resisting, just listened. I'd discovered the beauty of his looping, circular mind. It turned out his discursos eventually , like now, did end. He walked over to his favorite spot, facing Beachside, plugged his laptop in and settled down to write.
I reached in my sack for my marble notebook. When I had feelings I couldn't hold I went to my notebook to write some of them down. My envy of Adela's accomplishments, my rage and anger at my own life of insignificance, my grief at the art I never made, my shame at my inability to figure out work other than to be a burocrat in a rogue burocrazy...My terror of the predators...And even my despair at Adela's insight...in collapsing capitalism there was no rational work to be had...in a rational world my profession would disappear...Certainly, my profession, my former profession before I'd turned into a tracker, would disappear. I had been one of those who had jobs because other people didn't. Adela whose accomplishments I envied, had given me a way to think about my failures as not personal, or not purely personal, a way to exonerate my lack of accomplishment. (But why did this add to my sense of failure?)...I had consumed my life in irrational jobs through no fault of my own. But appropriating her insight didn't usher in understanding and self-compassion, instead I envied her that as well...I felt rage that I didn't know it before, that I'd wasted so much time feeling bad about myself. All of this distress had to be purged through the act of writing...
As I braced myself to face my laptop I had a useful, joyous thought, a fresh one, outside the gerbil wheel of my internalized oppression...Yes! Everything that kept me from writing, that was the very thing I had to be writing about. It was what I had spent my life writing about, and it was something. In that light all of my life was about my writing, about my art. I had been an artist all along. I renewed my vow to review the notebooks and flash drives and files on my laptop, the patchwork of my writings that happened to come here with me from the vast accumulation of texts from my life, to make sense of it in the moments between tracking Ori, to pursue my inquiry in this new Adela revealed light.