Rouge Wave: In the First Person

Rouge Waver Maria Clara Mattos submitted this lovely, descriptive first person essay and I thought it was really great:

When I sometimes get tired of myself

By Maria Clara Mattos

Today is one of those where I am so tired of being me, so terribly dog-tired of my thoughts, the only thing I can imagine giving me a break, a vacation, a breeze would be… brain switch! Aren’t there people you admire just because they’re so different from you? You see them as practical, go-getters, doers. Me? No. Sometimes I think I think too much. See? I think I think. Isn’t it hyperbolic? I think I wanted to be a person who thinks of something and simply does it. Who doesn’t think of something, then think of the ifs and whys and hows and whens and gets lost with all this thinking and can’t go ahead with the plan of having a script rewrite finally done, or can’t decide what to write about today or even what to eat for lunch. It’s not that I don’t like myself or my thoughts and all. I kind of like them. What bothers me is the thinking. I mean, if I could create a schedule for my thinking, maybe it would already be fine. Something that went like “today I’ll think about this” and do whatever it is that’s related to that thought. Tomorrow is another day; it’s the day of new thinking. And so on. I have friends who do that. If they were fine with it I’d trade brains with them. Not forever. No. Just for a few days, weeks or months. Just to get a different perspective on my own thoughts. Yes, I’d still be me, I’d still have my thought files preserved, but, when approaching them, I’d be using someone else’s experiences, life records, words, analogies, humor - or the lack of it… no, I’d never trade brains with a humorless person, I’m sorry, that’s a primary condition. But when it comes to thinking about that, well, isn’t that exactly what writers do? Switch brains with a character? Don’t we have to open a new file in our brain to be able to speak as somebody else, to live a life we invented? To fall in love with somebody we’ve never seen or met or talked to? Maybe this is what all this thinking is about. The many characters screaming to come out, to be given a chance to choose my lunch, my steps, the books I read, the parties I go, the places I visit, the lines I deliver. Be it in real life, be it in fiction. Be it a screenplay, a first person essay, a novel, a note to a friend, a message on someone’s answering machine, blog, cellphone. Today we can live different lives even when we’re not writers, actors, or just crazies. There are avatars, dating sites, websites, virtual places where you can be whatever you want. Choose the color of your hair. Your name. The nature of your speech. Your diet. The way you approach life. Only we, writers, have done it forever. Over blank pages.

I guess I’m not tired anymore.

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If you too are a "thinker junkie" check out Eckhard Tolle's The Power of Now. It's helped the Wave-inatrix a ton.

If you would like to submit a 500-word first person essay to the Rouge Wave, just email me HERE and if you've written a pithy, evocative, entertaining piece you will definitely see it on the Wave.

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