When I was younger, I thought writing was something anyone could do. It was just a thing you did, like math or macaroni art. You know subject-verb agreement? Bam! Writer.
Writing was just stringing words together to form sentences, sentences to form paragraphs, and paragraphs to make up whatever bullshit assignment the teacher foisted upon us unsuspecting students yet again.
But then something happened. I think I was around 10 or 11 years old when I realized that it wasn’t all so simple. Classmates started complimenting my work. Teachers held up my essays as models of exemplary writing.
My words made people laugh. They made people angry. They made people cry. They made people care.
I could make people feel.
I realized with malevolent glee that I could manipulate people. Writing isn’t just a skill – it’s talent.
And I had it.
I had power.
I couldn’t do sports. I could never get the damn volleyball to fly over the net. I sucked at jackstone and couldn’t jump past waist-height at Chinese garter.
I was lousy at math and my art teacher hated me. I couldn’t sing, couldn’t dance, couldn’t act.
I could barely talk to people and make friends, but goddamit, I could write.
So I did. I wrote, constantly, regularly. I wrote because it was all I knew.
Senior year, I was editor-in-chief of the school paper. College loomed before me, and already I’d decided that I would pursue a career in writing.
Of course, now I say “decided”, because nostalgia is a thing (and Milan Kundera said it better than I ever could). At that time I was far too drunk on the idea of writing that I just chose whatever college course seemed most likely to earn me “more” glory and recognition. I was so wrapped up in the idea that I was a writer and that thought kept me cocooned, stupidly thinking that I could take any course remotely related to writing and blow everyone away.
I was the worst kind of teenager – a teenager harboring delusions of grandeur.
I don’t remember the exact day my world came crashing down, which is odd. Given the significance, you would think I’d have at least taken note of the date. It doesn’t matter, though, because I remember the exact four words that drove me to my knees.
“You’re wasting your potential,” my English teacher said.
She’d called me into her office to discuss my work – a writing assignment I’d submitted a week earlier. I thought she liked my work. I thought she liked me.
She thought I was slacking.
I was confused, so I smiled and shrugged, like I had meant to waste my potential all along. Like I had aimed for mediocrity deliberately. Like I wanted to be less than what I could truly offer.
So I smiled, because I’m nothing if not extremely proud, and I would have rather died than admitted the truth.
I didn’t know how to be better.
I tried. Over the years I really tried to be better. I read more. I wrote more. I tried very, very hard.
But I couldn’t, because the truth is that I’ve never really been in control of my writing. The words come unbidden. They come together of their own accord.
I always say I only write when I feel like writing, because in reality I can only write when the words are already there, in my head, egging me on.
Some days I’ll spend hours writing happily, thinking I might have finally done it. Finally I can make the words do my bidding rather than the other way around.
But then I read my work and the only thing reverberating in my head is a question: what is this drivel?
(If I’m being expressive, those four words will be punctuated with filthy swearing, because I’m particularly good at verbally abusing myself.)
I read my work and ask myself: is this really something you’d like to show people? They will laugh, and they will mock, and they will ridicule.
Because I don’t know how to be better.
I don’t know how to write without revealing all my insecurities. I don’t know how to write without laying myself bare. I don’t know how to write without being really, truly honest and it scares me, because I am convinced that the real me is not a pretty sight.
I don’t know how to get past the anger and the self-loathing.
I don’t know how to be better.
I still don’t.
But some days, the words come and I am compelled to write, and it is glorious.
Illustration by Leila Brient.
