Editing

Working on cleaning up some poems. This feels fairly slow going, but I’m really happy to be in this mode again.

I’m thinking a bit more on the somewhat recent return to writing I’ve had. And I’m thinking about how we define ourselves. Purpose and meaning and who we are – all that fun stuff.

For as long as I remember, when I was in high school and through college… I wanted to be a poet. I wrote a ton of poems about death and sex and an ungodly number of poems about heartache. Most of these poems rhymed.

In graduate school, I thought of myself as a writer. I hung out with writers. I drank with writers. It’s all I talked about, and writing surrounded me at all times. I talked poetry with colleagues, and we had serious, lengthy discussions on the kind of minutia that only other people like us cared to argue about. I still wrote a lot about death and sex and heartache, although in more equal percentages.

Some poems rhymed; some didn’t.

When I graduated, I lucked out with a job doing Flash design. I slowly found myself leaning farther away from the writing life and becoming immersed in computers, the Internet. I met other folks online who used the same applications and worked on similar projects. Many were designers. Many were programmers. Over time, I began surrounding myself with tech folk more and more.

Lately, I’m not sure how I define myself. For a good while this past year, I defined myself through my work. My job was who I was, and I invested a lot into that identity. Sometime this year, I was able to (begin to) shake myself from that definition. It still feels to me though, like I don’t know who I am. What I am.

I feel like I have some small modicum of design skill, but wouldn’t call myself a designer. I’ve had some experience working in detail with ActionScript, but wouldn’t call myself a programmer. I feel like I’m a guy who happens to know how to use a handful of tools.

Writer? Designer? Coder? Developer? I don’t know.

This past week, I guess my leanings have been toward writing. Which makes me feel good. I’m starting to actively look forward to the end of the workday so I can get home and get to work on poems. That seems to me an exceedingly good sign.