Writing as Thought Crystallization

Grr, I'm falling again into old patterns of not writing things that I desperately want to write because the task of doing them justice is too daunting! My tactic right now is just to get things out. Get practice writing. Once the writing gets easier, maybe I'll start adding an editing phase. For now I'm still just trying to get things out. So here are a few thoughts on writing, language, and thinking.

In high school there was a point when i believed that anything could be "talked out." A few years ago I started witnessing what I considered a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of sorts, in the way that you often cannot talk about your feelings about something without changing how you feel about that thing. This gets even more complicated when two people are talking about their feelings about each other and each other's feelings.

I also used to believe that thinking and ideas were very separate from language. Well, obviously not entirely separate, but separate in that they could exist independently. That is, I could have a thought or belief that I had yet to put into words. Now, I still believe this, and there are obviously different types of thoughts. For example, I can think about the color blue. Or when you're searching for the right adjective to describe that exact quality in a person (I just had some fun playing the adjective game with R). Basically I was rejecting both the language of thought hypothesis and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

But I think I may have been taking it too far and believed that I had ideas or thoughts that were....not quite there. I am starting to recognize more how much putting my thoughts into words helps me crystallize my ideas and concepts. In analytical writing even more so than in verbal language.

Trying to write this post is so funny because I feel like I'm encountering now exactly the phenomenon that makes me want to write it! And that phenomenon is.....that I feel like I have an idea, a concept. Thoughts. It feels like they are concrete. Yet when I go to put them into words, I find not just that I have trouble articulating my idea, but that my idea really was not as concrete as I thought it was to begin with! But through writing I am able to distill my thoughts into clearer, more organized ideas, which I am then able to communicate.

Hence, my newly found enthusiasm for writing.