I'm bothered. Extremely bothered, really. For some reason apparently well beyond my understanding, I've lost something terribly important. Whether this is a permanent or temporary loss is, for the moment, immaterial. I've lost it. Complicating matters somewhat is the fact that I do not actually know exactly what I've lost. If it weren't for the obvious changes brought about by this loss, I might take the lack of knowledge of what I've lost to mean that perhaps I'd lost nothing. This, as the previous sentence implies, is not the case. If you've been paying attention for the past, oh, four months, you know where this is going.

I've lost the passion for writing. That's not true, actually. I've lost the drive to write, I think, but that's not quite encapsulating the concept like I'd like it to do. This is, as in the above paragraph, probably not aided by my uncertainty as to the specific nature of whatever it is precisely that's been lost. But I just don't feel the same urge to write something, to entertain or ruminate or... whatever I might have done on a given day. I look at the things I wrote last year, and I remember how deeply satisfying writing was. How I would sometimes use my entire lunch hour hurriedly writing an entry because it was bursting out of me like some sort of horrible alien baby lodged in my chest. How I once spent several hours tweaking an entry to get it just so. And now it's... not. It's different somehow, and the only realistic variable - the only variable worth considering in such a matter, given the simultaneous facts of the personal nature of writing and the profound variability of any person, especially myself - is me.

Maybe it isn't that I've lost something. Maybe it's just that I've changed. I don't want to say "grown", because I have a hard time accepting that growth can lead one away from something like self-expression. That much seems more like regression to me.

A part of this I recognize all too well, actually. I've been here before, in a way. A part of this overall lack of drive is my longtime companion who goes by many names but is most perspicuously called I'm Not Good Enough. Like most people who share certain intellectual traits with me, I suffer from a reasonably persistent low self-esteem. No surprise, and I can usually just blow off the clouds of doubt because they are chiefly composed of bullshit. Still, there's always that factor, that little fragment, which aspires to seep in and strike at the least convenient of moments. And given my own personal code of conduct, there are actually a lot of moments for that to happen.

Of course, there's something to be said for a realistic appraisal of one's abilities. I know I am a good writer. I might even be called an excellent writer. But all one has to do is take a random sampling of the various people around blogdrive to see that I am not an exceptional writer. I write well, but I do not write memorably. Sometimes I will put down a book and think about how remarkable the author must be, how noteworthy he or she is - and this is an impression which will stay with me. I note this sometimes also when reading other people on the Internet. I know that some people get a kick out of my writing, and I think that's great. It is, in the end, exactly why I write. But there are people out there who write truly breathtaking stuff with a casual grace which far surpasses my talents of comprehension or replication. I want that ability, to so effortlessly create. To be, in a word, memorable. Noteworthy. It is a state of affairs which requires an awareness of my strengths and my limitations - fundamentally, that however good I am there exist so many people compared to whom my talent is as paltry as a gnat is to me.

Of course, this is essentially self-evident. There is no "pinnacle" of talent, per se. The saying about there always being someone better is quite literally true. I understand that; it hasn't stopped me before, and I see no reason why it should be the principle factor explaining my recent sort of ennui vis-a-vis writing now. That said, I cannot deny that it is a factor, and probably, at this point, the only one I can really identify or understand.