Writing Rumination II
I am trying to sit with myself. I am trying to sit here and draw boundaries between the places I think I’ve ultimately been harmed, places where I feel fear and insecurity, and then places of mental health, ADHD dopamine-seeking and autistic burnout. I’m having those thoughts again. The kind where I think I’m a fraud. When I try to examine them, I get furious. Reflexively, I ask myself if I’m being honest about wanting to be a writer; if it means as much to me as it once had. I don’t feel a response. The silence echoes in my body cavity. Is this another quarter-life crisis? I vacillate between wanting to tell myself it’s not my fault and things just aren’t ideal. And then I think back to every single self-help thing I’ve read for a writer.
How to write when you don’t feel like writing. Even if you don’t feel like writing, make yourself write. Write a little each day.
Maybe I am burnt out. Maybe I am not being supported in the ways I need to be supported. Maybe this is an incredibly arduous uphill walk and I need to cut myself great slack. Maybe I exist in a creative vacuum and that’s all I’ll ever exist in.
I’m trying to trace the history of when I felt joy in writing, and I was eager to do it. I remember in that last year of elementary school, I couldn’t stop reading and writing. I remember in middle school; it was a bit the same, but I had online role plays supplementing those feel-good brain chemicals. I felt like I was working towards something, though. Then there was high school. I stopped being received creatively by teachers. I turned to role play full-time as a means of escape and dissociation. I remember starting freshman year hoping to write a novel, but by senior year, I felt like I couldn’t do it and I took what I thought was the manageable path and did a collection of poetry and flash fiction. I remember thinking, as I transitioned from high school to college, that I would finally have the time and ability to write; I was swearing off role play (as if it were an addiction) and I told myself I would only write fiction. I wasn’t successful at staying away from it. The years from that point forward blur together in a haze of doing writing I didn’t want to do, which didn’t bring me joy or that I was enthusiastic about, until 2019, when I was living on my own for the first time. I crafted away at that chapter. I was so immensely happy and proud of myself… and too eager to show the world.
I don’t even remember what he’d said. I remember how crushed I felt though. I recall, on the vaguest inkling as he explained that when he was growing up, the adults in his life punched down at him to keep him realistic about things. He did it reflexively. His greatest critique of me is that I was and am too emotional; too sentimental. I don’t think I’ve been able to write for myself authentically since then. I am angry. I feel diminished. I was diminished. And now I have to be the one person by myself to build myself back up and honestly? I don’t think it’s supposed to be that way. It’s a very white, very individualistic, very classist, very ablest, very capitalist way of thinking. It’s isolating. And I am floundering alone. The dramatic irony, however, is that even if the community reached out for me, I don’t think I’d recognize it, and like a hand reaching into the water for me, I wouldn’t know what it is, or what to do with it, and I’d still drown.
I will drown in my silence… paralyzed as I slip soundlessly beneath the waters of my own unmaking, and no one will notice. Not one person.
I am not a bottomless pit of need, despite what other people have made me feel, because they have only offered scraps of their meager attention.
Every time I’ve attempted to return to this story with Celeste, I am met with a barrier of something else. I feel like I must dissemble before I feel like I can progress. Tonight, I was questioning if I really need all the characters I’ve been sourcing from experiences. Their presence, inherently, reminds me of the abuses I’ve had to endure throughout all my friendships with men. And to what end? The story becomes about the perseverance of a woman through the abuse she suffers at the hands and minds of men. And it ends, how? A happily ever after in a two-prong thropple? That feels like… way too many dicks for my comfort, honestly. I suppose I will just… have to scrap a bunch of characters.
I need to continually free myself from the shackles I willingly put on to curry favor with people I considered friends who don’t deserve space in my writing, whatsoever.