Hello friends!
I hope you all are doing well. It's been quite a while since I've posted. I took on a few too many things over the last few months, so my free minutes have been spent watching Gilmore Girl reruns and weeping into bowls of Crispix. Just kidding. Sort of. Anyway, I hope you all had a great Christmas. I'm feeling incredibly grateful to have some time to relax, sleep late, read books, and discover what percentage of the day my dogs spend licking themselves in inappropriate places (I'd say about 63%)
I've been thinking a lot lately about writing, and as an extension, about who I am. You see, I've had the writers block that just won't quit. I have a thesis that I desperately need to work on if I ever hope to finish graduate school, and when I sit down to write, I find myself completely blanking out.
I've used excuses...I'm busy, my classes have been in a different concentration, I will wait until after _________, but the truth is....I am just blocked. I'm so terrified that what I'm going to say is trite or stupid or cliched, that I just end up saying nothing....I have about a dozen separate documents, all with a paragraph or page written...little puzzle pieces of thought, but from about sixteen different puzzles.
So of course, as an obsessive thinker and analyzer, I started trying to figure out where the block is coming from. What do I hope to accomplish with my writing? What do I want to say? Why the hell do I even do it? I thought about when I started writing. I was young...elementary school. Any of my siblings can attest to the fact that I was obsessed with reading. One summer I was grounded, the terms of the grounding were that I was only allowed to read one hour a day. In an act of ferocious defiance, I just smuggled paperbacks outside in the elastic waistband of my shorts and sat in the church parking lot down the road enjoying my Sweet Valley High.
In elementary school, I started writing. I wrote poems, songs about the Browns and bible stories, mediocre stories. I can't remember why I started, but I can remember why I continued. I loved hearing people tell me they thought it was good. I loved feeling smart and wise. I liked feeling like people heard me. I felt the person I was in real life didn't match who I was inside, and writing helped bridge that gap.
And sadly, twenty years later, I wonder if that is still what my writing is about. A passive declaration of identity. An attempt to prove that I am smart, and funny, that there's more to me than what meets the eye. I recently read through a story I had written and crossed out all the humor I'd included that did nothing to enhance the story. It cut the story down by 2 pages. This made me really re-think my writing. Maybe I'm not as good as I've always been told. Maybe I am the writer equivalent of the American Idol contestant who sounds like a strangled cat but thinks they are a star because no one has ever had the courage to tell them they aren't good. Maybe all these stories have just been a practice in intellectual masturbation, saying nothing new or interesting.
I suppose this is all a bit melodramatic, and self pity is not really what I'm getting at. The fact of the matter is, there are a lot of the people that have the ability to write technically well. They have an engaging voice, use lovely metaphors, weave a compelling story with their words. But in my opinion a writer should have something to SAY. If you are not writing because you have something to say, then why are you? And I do have things to say. I feel like I have a unique perspective, a sense of insight that is mine and mine alone. I connect with other writers, I love reading, I sometimes go through my book collection looking for the beautiful sentences I have highlighted, just because a well written sentence inspires me. Whatever narcissistic reasons I may have for being a writer, I genuinely feel like it's what I want to do.
But I think what's crippling me is fear. As in life, sometimes it's hard to just say...aww hell. Who cares what people think? I'm going to do what I want. Most people who know me would describe me as scatterbrained, habitually late, and a procrastinator. Over the past two years, I have been earnestly working to overcome some of these things-I've spent my time organizing, cleaning, making lists. I've worked on focusing on tasks at work, on embracing my habits and working around them. I've worked on controlling impulses. I've tried to be more practical. My classes that I am taking are in a concentration to further the career I have. I've worked hard to keep my house clean, to follow through on tasks.
But though these things have helped me to be more successful, I wonder if they've made me happier? Perhaps there is a relationship between me being more organized and pragmatic and my writer's block. On the outside looking in, my life is better than it used to be. I'm a little skinnier, my house is cleaner, I got a promotion, I'm getting married in March. But the truth is there's a part of me that thrives on the disorder I've lived in. A part of me that loves frantically finishing things just before the deadline. A part of me that HATES that I've been taking a linguistics class that has dissected language, painted it as merely a formulaic series of grunts and noises as opposed to a living breathing reflection of who we are and what is important to us. A part of me that is disgusted by the fact that there have been times I've passed up taking the time to write because I thought it was more important to dust or do laundry.
I suppose most people go through this stage, where they try desperately to hang on to their young, creative, idealistic self while trying to be a grown up. But I don't want to just coast through life on autopilot, letting circumstance drive my experiences, as opposed to letting me drive my circumstances.
So often, when we hear of the term "settling" we are referring to settling in terms of a choice of significant other. Why don't we ever talk about settling for who we are? In our society, it's not okay to choose a mate who isn't deemed worthy, but it's somehow okay to accept less than we ourselves are capable of for the sake of being responsible. But I reject that. I don't want to settle for being less than I know I'm capable of. Though I have self doubt, I know that I have more to give the world than a clean house and a biweekly newsletter. It seems to me that people who come to the end of their lives with regret don't do so because they chose to be mediocre, they do so because they went through life making one decision at a time, each choice binding them tighter and tighter to the life they've lived, to the point that they get to a place that they think it's too late to change. I don't want to do that. Though I'm not always positive that I'm a great writer, I know that I have so much to say. And so I am rededicating myself to being a writer. I can still be good at my job, and more organized, but I am not going to let that squelch who I am and what's important to me. I'm going to make my goals a priority, not an afterthought. Being a writer may not be practical, I may never make a living at it, I may never be successful. But none of that should be the basis of my decision to write or not write. I refuse to settle for less than I can be. I can accept that I am imperfect, but I can not accept mediocrity by default.
Well I suppose I should wrap this up, I've been rambling for quite a while. I hope to be posting more often, but even if not on here, I will be writing every day.
Happy New Year my friends.
