~
Tea in hand, I move forward to embrace the world.
I’ll most likely get tea on it,
if nothing else.
~
As soon as my writing became about me and not about the creation itself, it died, and it has been struggling back from its weary, thin roots ever since.
Once, I wrote for the sheer writing of it. Hopelessly, aimlessly improving my skill and baring my soul to the page again and again and again. The few people who read my writing appeared – to me – to pity me, never finding meaning in what I’d done. This tortured me, and added to my thoughts that a) I was not ready to bring my writing out into the world yet, and b) I would perhaps never be fit for public consumption. I was used to being a loner, and this suited me just fine, I thought. I had seen what success had done to others, and I preferred to steer clear of all that, thanks.
So, having abandoned the idea of achievement in my chosen field a long, long time ago (understanding, of course, that to most minds a writer is secondarily recognised but firstly read, and that I myself am neither), it disturbed me greatly to find that somewhere along the line I had let my guard down. I had begun, in dribs and drabs, to let go of my weighty resignation in regards to my future as ‘a writer’– and not only that, but to develop a keenly sharpened sense of guilt that I was hoarding everything to myself and that I had no earthly idea how to get rid of my hoard. In squiggled the self-righteous, doomful thought that I ought to succeed, and that I should batter doors down until I did! This idea made an untidy home in me and – to my horror – bedded in for the long haul.
Ideas are imprinted on our grey matter. It is difficult if not impossible to abolish them completely. This caustic idea of my guilt and failure began to punish me, to eat away at my spleen and liver, to murder my guts. And a writer has to have guts. For many reasons, a writer has to have guts, not least of which is that we need them to feel with.
Mostly now, wonder and inspiration is gone, leaving mere pleasure in its place. Gratefulness and contentedness, the sisters of joy, are too tame for me now; I must find and attain elation, completion, acceptance – I must be seen, I must be praised. In essence, I am a diva with no audience: a soul without a boat.
I seek all the wrong things. I liked it better when I knew I would always be alone.
And I don’t really write anymore. Not the way I used to. This is almost an afterthought, or unposted letters to a lost love. My heart simply will not engage. I stutter and stop, stoop, adjust, wail and mourn and then lie still, dry eyed. The clarity of my position accosts me, but I have nothing to do, nothing that would bring back my guts from the grave.
I’ll be rattling around in this cage until my tombstone rises up from the matter of which I’m made, chanting “Los-er, los-er, los-er, you had it all and you lost it, weak-kneed and glassy-eyed for shame.”
My dark side is a bitch.
Idiolalia 