The desire to exist..

At school we eat it. Almost too much. When you don't like it, it's hell. 
Dissertations, readings, explanations of texts, summaries, essays, dictations... In France we first count, then write. And we don't improvise Molière's tongue, no sir.
Subject, verb, complement first.

Introduction, development, conclusion then.
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis after.
And then later on, just plain thesis.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*XIC4LMUhGqJQGXL-woK21Q.jpeg

It was there, for my part, that I started to lose track.
The academic style was a wonderful food for intellectual curiosity but a torture for creative ambitions. I tried to force my thoughts on this rigidity, or even on this literary aridity for three years, but I never succeeded.

Yet I like to think, so I like to write. 
But writing only about thought according to the so-called scientific method has nothing to offer in terms of literature. This led me to empty myself from the inside, made me sick of reading so much it was necessary to read, synthesize, ingest hundreds of articles repeating more or less without ever saying anything, really. 
The academic world is an industrial world like any other.
You write what you already know, so you learn little. You can also get away from yourself, which is what happened to me. I resigned the second I realized that science was not a space for expression but for coercion of thought, and therefore of course for writing.

However, I would have learnt a lot from this detour by the scientific thought, constructed, complex, necessary, exciting but also sometimes arid. 
It took science to understand that I needed art.

When I got out of school, my thoughts were crumbled, I didn't write anymore. In the meantime, everything has changed. I did my schooling on double check double copies and a four-color pen, the master on blue and Word bike notepads, my doctorate on Evernote and my first job on Linux.

I then spent five years without touching a pen, bicycle, fountain pen or anything else. Let's not talk about pencils, let alone coloured pencils. Apart from a few doodles in the meeting room, between the MacBook Pro and the Galaxy S6, nothing came out of my pen. 
Or my mind, for that matter. 
Exit blogs, news, stories scribbled on rough paper at night, in my room. The zany, sad or thrilling written texts spat out on paper by necessity, to free up space on the hard disk of my mind.

There I had to learn everything from a world of which I knew nothing and which always goes very fast. More and more quickly, that's his goal.
Numbers. Methods. Metrics.
Cost per Customer Acquisition. The growth spleen. 
The Return On Investment. The click rate, A/B testings and other returning spleens.

The hundreds of emails exchanged every day, mostly in English, led me to an effective, technical style of writing, where geek humour had its place from time to time. I've written a lot, a lot of chat, mostly.

I no longer spoke to the other person, I wrote to him, even though he was a few meters away from my chair. Thousands of characters at the end, a coded language dedicated to pure productivity.

Writing was no longer used to tell or even to think, but to do. 
Hurry, preferably.

I had a very hot correspondence with my colleagues, the only relationship we have apart from a sandwich that is being hastily shared every lunchtime.
To avenge myself of this other still arid world but for other reasons, I practiced the amorous correspondence. Other channels, other detours, but always the exchange of emails, paper letters, small words, mailings accompanied by flowers, gifts, photos, bullshit. Creativity has its place in flirting, especially when fun is mutual.

We have thus created, on both sides of the Atlantic. Photo novels. Comic books. Tales. News bulletins. Newspapers. I also tried to write the lack, the distance, the hard blows. Emotions don't always come out properly. 
It's not easy to keep a diary together.