I’m writing right now. It’s good. It’s solid. The first thing I ever wanted to be in life was a writer, but at some point I realized how impractical that was as a profession, so I moved it from the career column to the hobby column. Muscles atrophied and confidence withered. I became crippled by my inability to end stories. So I stopped for a while. And then I started back. And then I stopped again.
It comes and goes, it seems. I wrote a mediocre blank verse poem about my fickle muse once several years ago, about how the desire to create worlds can evaporate when you let other things get in the way. Or even if you don’t. But I know that it’s something I’ll never be able to give up. It’s just that I’ve got to figure out how to get better at it. How to do it more often. How to move it from hobby column past career column to obsession column.
There’s just so much happening right now. I’m giving off light and heat and none of it’s for me and I’m afraid it’s all happening in a black hole anyway.
Today was awful, just awful. And for no particularly specific reason. It seems kind of silly now. But not entirely. I am letting conspiracy theories run amok in my head. I am imagining the worst about everything and everyone. I am so angry at so many people and so many intangible concepts. I bury my doubts because I am never sure they are real. I am quick to grimace. I am full of self-loathing. I am not even PMSing, which makes me so angry because it means it’s not just a matter of waiting it out. It’s a very real matter of feeling small and at the same time feeling unable to hide from everyone’s judgment. I feel guilty and embarrassed about things I’m not even sure ever happened. I feel fucking psycho lately, to be honest. Psycho and scared. Because whatever rotten thread has held all this together so far is about to snap. This I know.
And that’s fine. Nothing good ever happened without a catalyst.
Nothing bad ever did either, though.
So I wait.
And, in the meantime, I will try to write. It feels so goddamned right sometimes that I could cry at the way I lay words together — like bricks and mortar — to craft reality. Other times, it’s all too contrived. But right now, things need to be said, things need to be written down, things need to be chiseled into the marble of posterity, and I need to stop stalling.
It sucks to be at a crossroads and to know (or in my case have a very vague idea) where you need to be but no idea how to get there.
“I feel guilty and embarrassed about things I’m not even sure ever happened.”
You and everyone on Texts From Last Night.
Seriously, though, why do you let self-doubt become an excuse for not doing the thing you love? Practice will only make you better at what you do, and you’re pretty damn good at what you do to begin with.
Is it that you have skill and the curse of self-awareness? I know a lot of creative types who have the blessing of no self-awareness to cover the fact that they have no skill, but I think you know that you’re good at what you do when it comes to putting words on paper. And I think you’re aware of the power that that has, in a set of capable hands–words can change history, change minds, change hearts.
Anyone not encouraging that is either an idiot or jealous or both.
Geez, LT, you’re starting to sound like me. Maybe we should give each other writing assignments.
I just gave you a mental hug.