I write, therefore I am

Sometimes I feel as though this blog is taking over my life. So that it feels that I'm less a person writing about my life than a writer living out my own script. So that it feels as though I'm a spy, an observer, a journalist covering the beat of my own feelings. So that it feels as though the only reason I do things anymore is so I can write about them afterwards, so that I enjoy things not for the way they make me feel, but so I can explain later, to an audience of strangers, just how much I have enjoyed them, and why. So that, like a photographer hungry for scenes of carnage, I have come to accept pain, more, to seek it out (or failing that, to simply imagine it) so that there is something to write about every morning, beecause that is the only way I can prove to myself that I still exist. So that I live my life for the sake of being able to say that I have lived it.

"To thine own self be true", Polonius tells us. But which is the true self, and which the approximation? How can we begin to define this self that we are to be true to, and how do we know it is not who we are already? And if, in the end, our will to life is only the will to describe, to explain - if we are interested, not in the thing itself, but in the idea of it - does that make our lives any less real? What would Plato say? What would Blake? How can we seperate the intent from the action, the desire from the aftertaste? As Yeats says: "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"