My Mind's A Blank

White pages are intimidating. The blankness is so… Blank. It longs for words to fill it, ideas to bring it to life. This blankness, this absence that confronts people, often when they wish to do away with it, makes putting pen to paper a little more difficult. Why would I adulterate this clean sheet with my thoughts, and then scratch them out when they don’t ring true?

Blankness is made to be filled. There is nothing more satisfying to me than seeing my printer spit out sheets covered in word-processed thoughts. Yes, part of the satisfaction comes from seeing the word processor make sense of my thoughts and then push them into physical being, but the sense of achievement is also that I have filled something, that this sheet which was once so uniform is now overflowing with ideas and words, or even just meaningless characters. 

                White is purity. Don’t think white supremacy, or some virgin chained to a rock, about to be devoured. But white is simple. It is blank. It is ready for something else to come and overshadow it, cover it with characters or colors or ketchup stains. A white piece of paper positively invites me: “Come on, this uniformity is so boring, let’s spice it up a bit.” White needs something of another color to make it white, a stark black line to make the remainder of the paper look cleaner. But that’s not why we fill it. We don’t cover something in black to make the rest of it appear white.

                Most people like to fill things. It gives a sense of, well, fulfillment. A white paper lying on a desk is not there so people can admire its whiteness. White house walls don’t look truly lived in until there is a painting or a chair or a five-year-old’s fingerprint to break up the blankness. Some might say that purity is there to be made impure, and others might say that they just feel nervous wearing a white shirt until they’ve spilt red wine on it. Whether it’s conscious or unconscious, people want to put more into the white, so it’s not just white, it’s writing or painting or the signal that once their child was five. Maybe it feels friendlier, or maybe people just like to fill up things so they feel more accomplished. And accomplishment is what we are all striving for. 

And I have more to say, but I think I'll say it later.