[This is a journal entry from November 19th, 2007]

I’m bruised and exhausted from this last week. I’m numb and distant, an unwanted but understandable reaction. I feel like a tree whose sap has been sucked out with calculated malice. I’m eating my breakfast. Unlike my first month in South Africa, I’m not looking ahead to my week with excited and enthused eyes.

I’m back in my jail again. I am suffocated and I can’t talk freely. I’m back at a place where I can’t even throw out random ideas or dreams. Everything said passes through a pragmatic and analytical filter. How will this work? Doesn’t this contradict what you said 3 days ago? It will fail, why bother? This will distract you from your main job, why can’t you make up your mind?

That difficult week experienced coincided with me finishing Stephen King’s book On Writing. I ate up this book with a rediscovered voracity. Like the old times, I read it in a matter of days. I read a few of his fiction books in middle school, but I never understood and appreciated them. I even watched a few film adaptations with little enjoyment. Horror and fantasy never appealed to me. This is so for I never understood the purpose or appeal or the point to those genres.

Reading a book by Stephen King, narrating his own life and career, broke through my previous conceptions. I was able to understand with a personal touch through the delightful and incisive humour, and the frankness of which he speaks of his life. He links his developments as a writer with milestones and shows how a story like Tommyknockers comes from a story or thought pattern. Writing to King was his escape and fantasy was the type of tubing.

It’s not that horror and fantasy are pure escapist channels of expression. They are rich, limitless languages. They can express all things we observe and experience. I can think of where King explained how he came up with the idea for Carrie and the themes that developed from the story. (He explains in the more how-to part of the book that you never start a story or writing fiction with a theme in mind. You come to it later once you’ve worked out the story to a point of it being able to stand up on its own feet.)

As I write and think about what I’m writing, I feel like a child, mesmerized by the glistening of water bubbles in the air. In a way, it feels stupid, but it’s coming from a real place. I know why it feels stupid. Since I was a little child, I’ve had a long and deep experience of dreams. They became and have remained more visceral when I got to high school. By the time I was in college, dreams took a whole new surreal character. I can remember my dreams in enough detail to write about them, but I’ve never dared to do that. It feels stupid to reach in and express what’s inside. What if someone will pounce?

Just talking about them with a calculated vagueness is enough to bring on anxiety. They’ve always confused and scared me; the way they bring together unrelated concepts or events or people and sometimes produce images I cannot bear to recall. I can only think of one person I’ve told about what I’ve dream about. Telling my parents or friends at certain times only made sure I would never revisit that topic again.

When I was in London, I started reading Freud’s On Interpretation of Dreams and I’m more or less a subscriber to his theories on dreams. I remember sitting on the 316 on my way to Ladbroke Grove, trying to grasp the case studies he mentions while attempting to not explode over the chav who won’t stop yapping about his damn phone. His techniques and explanations are sound. Especially after a difficult night of dreaming, I’ll wake up in the morning and go through the pictures retained with Freud in mind.

So, I see a connection arising between my struggle with dreams, feeling stupid baring what’s inside, recent events at home, and my struggle to accept horror/fantasy genres. I’m the guy who will pontificate about the intellectual bankruptcy of the Scream franchise in a discussion about film. Behind my tendency to lambast those kinds of films lies a deep unrest about my imagination and what I see daily in my mind’s eye.

Like Stephen King, I have my own destructive ways of escaping. I regret that they’re not writing and film. I want them to be, but I’m honest with myself. My most fruitful years of writing were in high school. I wrote poems, song lyrics, and plays to a degree I can’t replicate now. It took so little impetus or drive then. I had no other alternative; the pen and blank expression of my notepad was all I needed. Second period of synthesis was when I became involved with the church I started going to in London. This period started while in university and continued after I graduated. I wrote more Christian material at that time: songs, plays, translated lyrics from Arabic hymnals, translation of Arabic spiritual and theological literature.

I look back at those two periods with great longing. They helped me express the suffocation and imprisonment I constantly felt. They brought up ideas and images from those deep recesses in a non-confrontational and indirect way. This way, I was getting to a point where I could really start unravelling, processing, and dealing with them.

Paul Giamatti’s character Miles in Sideways “Life is cyclical, I guess.” I’m back at a point where I’m unable to talk or think freely. I have ways to vent my feelings now, but… the ways are killing me.

Amy Winehouse, I agree with you: “I’m back to black.”

I read this and this article about her over the weekend and I knew how black I was. I ranted and winged when she underperformed at Isle of Wight Festival. The articles showed me how far I’ve fallen from being anything of an artist. My inner turmoil has become so objectionable that I’m escaping and denying the torture a lot of people experience as they try to make sense of life through art.

That moment, seeing how far I’ve fallen, is not one I want to stand in again. If you can’t empathise, you’re nothing.

I’m finding it hard to finish this entry. I don’t know how to proceed.

I am afraid of expressing what’s the frivolous and substantial inside. People may get glimpses but that’s it. I remember feeling exposed after my friend Romana said, “What a dark mind you have!”. She had just finished reading a draft of Glimpse, my first short film screenplay. I agonized for days wondering if she thought less of me; there’s a lot of personal content in that film. I can remember lying on my bed in the Anson Road flat freaking out…

When I extrapolate and worry, I wonder if this gnawing fear and inability will crop up in romantic relationships with girls. I’m so worried. Contrary to every fantasy and thought I have, all I can predict is me, the distant and mystifying lover or partner, giving from a place that no one else can enter.

That is so scary… How does a person open up? Tear down walls without lunging into another extreme? What if the extreme escape valves get even more destructive?

Questions with no answers that I can think of right now.

Through reading that book, it’s clear to me I need to explore those questions and fears… it seems only fitting that I could do them in writing through fantasy and horror. The other day, I had to get up from an idle lie-down on the couch that ended up in some scary thought patterns. Yet, Stephen King embraced his imagination and developed it. He developed metaphors and images of what he observed through continued observation and refinement. I’ve wasted years ignoring my fears, running away from the questions, and lunging myself into nothingness. I am compelled to try out this path.

I did no writing all of last week and it saddens me. I almost lost the drive and ooze completely. A meeting with a potential collaborator for my film work – him, young and vibrant – gave me a new lease of energy. I took a fresh breath of air again.

At home, it’s gone back to how it was and what seems to work best. I speak in vague terms about what I’m doing and who I’m meeting. I hate this arrangement, but trying the more transparent route has been difficult and unsuccessful. So, the recent attempt of sharing my life at has made it obvious that I do want a relationship with my family and their involvement is important to me. I will no longer deny that. I know I will try again and may fail, even as I explain things over and over again in a language they can understand.

Maybe they will never be able or want to see things my way and I will learn that this is not because I have failed. Perhaps this is just the way things are.

If I could verbalize what I was thinking last week as I escaped, it would be:

What kind of fuckery is this?

It’s a new week and I don’t know what’s happening with my job at GDB. Nevertheless, I’m going to apply myself with diligence and concentration. (Update: it didn’t work out in the end.)

This week will be successful. The goal is to escape through writing and film. There is a lot to be done and I will do it.

With or without you, family.