writing and fear

by phil on Thursday Jan 29, 2009 4:58 PM
call to action, principles

I had a thought today that I think relates to the concept of fear and writing. It's the following:

Writing is an attachment.

What I notice is that the process of writing, of committing something to paper, is an expression of the form, "I'm not willing to part with this." Think of the most basic form of writing, a little shopping list or a TODO list. We do these things because we "don't want to forget." By extension, I think we write ideas down because we want to keep them, to pin them down. Inevitably we become attached to what we write, and so sometimes we intentionally write something down to form a bond.

Is a fear of writing, in some cases, some sort of attachment-anxiety? An unwillingness to be tied to a particular idea? There's a fear, perhaps, that if I put something out there, in writing, I'm forever bound to these words and these ideas.