A long thesis statement that i hope isnt too boring or bad

My favorite Old English kenning is weardloc, however it's actually spelled. Literally, weardloc (or something)  corresponds to the English words "word hoard." Translated for meaning, it connotes "vocabulary and rhetorical skill." It's first seen in Beowulf, in an early scene of verbal confrontation. A warrior named Unferth, jealous of Beowulf, or scared of him, or looking to score points in front of the warriors of Hrothgar's meadhall, challenges the veracity and splendor of the eponymous hero's deeds. Beowulf, in response to poor Unferth's challenge, "unlock[s] his word-hoard." By dint of superior intelligence, storytelling, and the heroically superlative excellence that led him to do the things he did, wins the first ever transcribed rap battle.

I learned that when I was sixteen, sitting in at a British Literature lecture by Chris Vaccaro, an adjunct professor who was smart and cool and bald, and whom I desperately wanted to impress. The idea of words being a treasure, a tool, even a weapon, struck me. I knew words as a soft safe space, but as a tool used in the real world of chewing gum and inhumanity--gosh. A chest of words that could level an opponent in four paragraphs was as cool or cooler than having a big sword. I'd probably pinpoint that day as the first I started trying to refine my innate proclivity for the English language and write.

It's hard for me to see whether or not I'm writing well on a given day. I think I'm too close to the things I write down to comprehend them fully at first, and I don't always feel like I'm in the driver's seat of what I set to pixels in black and white. I feel like I'm a one-person Civilian Conservation Corps crew commissioned to build the Grand Coulee Dam without the blueprints. All I have is the space I'm working on that day, and what I'm supposed to do to it. I can't see the shape of what I'm making at first, not until I've been doing it for days or weeks. I'm not in charge of anything more than the stretch of cliff face in front of me, and all I can do is jackhammer it as smooth as is in my power before moving on to the next bit of hard, crannied stone.

Words have become more busy and packed inside me in the last four years; it becomes more of a necessity to spill them out. In Beowulf, words are treasured and rare things, like healing nectars and poison-tipped daggers, to be safely stowed and brought out only when their power was needed. Now, in the world of museums and libraries and the internet, words are everywhere. Words are like bees, swirling around us on signs and phones and books and the dashboards of cars.

And there are people who have beehives inside them, and the bees breed. We try to let them out before they overcrowd, overheat, and die, and before we perish from the sickly sweetness of the honey we haven't harvested.

I'm probably sounding very pretentious, as though words and writing are my Great Purpose in life. You may be thinking,

"This is awful big talk from someone with no published stories and essays, saying their expressed ideas and opinions are of some cosmic importance even though, given their background as the demographic who've always been given the most ample opportunity to speak their mind, probably has the least to say of anyone."

If you're thinking something like that, either I'm not writing clearly or you are as judgmental as the part of my psyche that's always telling me that. If my words are construed to mean that I consider myself a literary demigod, then they are misconstrued. I'm trying to say that words have become, through a childhood spent reading books and an adolescence spent writing them, a fundamental part of my being. I used to write because I wanted to be famous. Now I write because to not write is an act of self-harm. I keep this blog to keep myself writing, and on the off chance that anyone enjoys what I write. The world becomes a nicer place. And it makes me happy.

People do the things they do to understand themselves. Or at least I do. If I went through life without trying to process my thoughts and feelings into a comprehensible written form, I would be ridden by a mute gargoyle, a depressive numbness that keeps against sunlight and dappled shadows and smiling at people who need a smile and ignoring people who want to be left alone. I know this to be true because it happens.

Professional authorship used to be a fancy of mine, a vanity of imagination. Now, to be paid a living wage on the strength of my compulsive self-therapy would be the kindest thing that could happen to me. I would be a professional world-observer, a thought-provoker, the person who reminds people in sleeping shells of ordinary to sit up and open their eyes. I desire it so so much. If I fail in this, then I fail in this. Life has no compensatory kindness if I do. And honestly, my biggest fear is, as David Bowie put it about someone he made up, that I'm "made to be an artist, but not a good artist." I write now to keep that fear at bay, because most paradoxically, spilling paragraphs of introspective fear and stubbornness is what makes me the most serene and sure of myself.

I honestly, truly have no idea whether or not I just wrote six or seven paragraphs of good writing or whether it was all self-indulgent schlock. I don't know if I can know one way or another, not when the writing is this personal.

The best I can do is unlock my word-hoard, let out the bees, and see what honey they've fomented in my absence, while I ate breakfast, sat on a train, paid two euro for coffee and a croissant and a visit to the bathroom, and sat down in Luxembourg Gardens to finish a book.

Thanks for reading.