Don't get me wrong, I'm breathing just fine, but there is a sense of suffocation in my life; there are too many people in the world. I mean it, there are too many babies and toddlers and tweens and teens and college students and dropouts and middle agers and too many old folks. I have nothing personally against any but one of them, it's not that I want anyone to die, I am just worried that we are too many books on a table whose legs are silently, slowly giving out.
I imagine my tiny little life in the upstairs left of a four-plex, with my one little dog and my husband, and we grow a little bit of our food and try hard to buy locally when possible. Then I multiply that by seven billion and I get worried that we're overwhelming the ecosystem. Even if we are okay, as in, even if we can afford all our bills and we're getting along just fine and the dog is in good health, there's still the fact that we are too many books on a table whose legs are silently, slowly giving out.
More specifically, I'm suffocated by the feeling that I cannot think any original thought. That's a horrible thing, isn't it; not being able to invent some twist on the existing, some new form of the old? What if everything I'm writing has been written before, or is being written right now, by someone more charming and more marketable than me? That a person is pondering the same questions, drawing the same conclusions, right now, somewhere else, is a frightening prospect that I can't seem to shake. I feel like a speck.
Also, I was recently rejected from the English Master's program I applied for, and so of course that makes me feel specky too. Rather than take it in stride, cry a bit and move on, I'm handling this is in the healthiest way I can think of: taking it as a personal insult and searching madly for justifications to give up on the whole enterprise of writing for the rest of my life. I lost the magic, the strange spiritual halo that surrounded me and kept me always being honored and praised for work I hardly lifted a finger to complete. Everything must be different now, now that I'm old and overgrown and past the stage for new beginnings. I serve tables, and I don't even have much of a reputation for succeeding at that. I'm 26. This must be the end.
Listen here. I did always know that I wasn't magic, and the work I did was probably much harder than I like to think. I'll never give up writing, I can't. I think as a writer and I can't stop thinking, even when I try. I'm a child, in age and experience, and I'm probably pretty good at my job. I've got a whole knapsack of flaws strung over my shoulder, but I'm deeply committed to working on them. I've been lethargic because I'm afraid of the mistakes I've made, the wrong directions I've taken to marching off in. In a search for peace, I've found quiet and I need the noise back in my life. In my quest to separate myself from friends I've had who were a danger to themselves, myself and others, I've run off to solitude, preferring my little family and a pen to the world around me. I'm overcorrecting. I need to straighten out.
So instead of shopping and laundry and the tired anxiety I maintain toward my messy house, I need to focus on telling stories. I do. I really need to sharpen my glaring inadequacies and stab the page with them, slicing it's flesh and spilling the literature I'm so damn scared I might let out. I'm not a normal girl. I'm not a little speck among the billions, suffocating with generic experiences. I grew up strangely, in a family that wandered to the beat of some angry, maniacal drum off in the distance. My infant self never developed a sense of object permanence. I never believed that what was gone would return, and as such I missed out on almost all forms of trust. In the first grade, I tried desperately to outsmart God before deciding, in the end, that sadly, he is false. Also, I am way more annoyed by daily life than a normal human, so that's original. And I'm going to New Zealand in a week. All of that rolled together should create some kind of literary burrito that might possibly result in the taking seriously of my dreams.
CONGRATULATIONS!!!! [confetti] You have just used your 10,000,000,000th comma!
I have to develop and evolve. Even if everyone else is doing it too.
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