When I first started writing in college, I was cynical and I was incensed and I was biting. I enjoyed writing about anything because I had this anger to push me forward. I mean I didn't even have to be angry about a particular subject to write about it, the anger wasn't necessarily directed at anything. My writing wasn't emotional or revealing, but it was strong because it needed to be written. I had all these opinions and criticisms and they fueled the writing process. I had thoughts and shit to say.
And I did well writing like that. I had high marks with my writing in high school....as much as my teachers might have complained about the necessity of some of my arguments or examples....they always marked me highly. That carried over into college; I was a solid A- student for the first three semesters. My instructors called me brilliant and insightful and sometimes even daring. I didn't work hard. Most of my writing assignments were completed the night before they were due or the night before that. I remember one particular paper requiring several alarms to be set in order to wake up at 4 AM to finish and print off because our power was out for the entirety of the evening before it was due. And still I maintained my 3.7 GPA.
But then I took a class called Advanced Composition and my instructor treated me like even more of a joy than any of the previous ones had. We shared a sarcastic but jovial rapport and she often intimated that she figured I was nothing short of a genius. But when I asked how I could become a better writer, she told me to expand my voice. She said that all of my writing was essentially the same and the only way to become a better writer in general is to become better at writing outside of one's own head. She recommended I try writing more vulnerable. Open myself. Embarrass myself. Stop writing with such a sense of smug knowing.
So I started writing about a lot of my insecurities. I wrote about my feelings and my anxieties. I tried to shed my cynicism and write without thinking or editing every second sentence. Some of my trial runs of such writing are posted on this website. In fact, the instructor I was referring to even commented on one or two of those trial runs and expressed her disappointment at my inability to reveal myself even further. When I think of it now, I wonder if she didn't mean for me to keep the bite but turn it on myself. Examine my own shortcomings and mock them for the benefit of my reader. Well I can absolutely do that, I have some material set aside to assist me with that task. But for now I just want to attempt to articulate how much I hate the advice she gave me.
I used to love writing. I loved the catharsis of a nice rant. I loved watching words unfurl on the screen while I mashed the keyboard. I loved watching the arcs and lines of letters slide out of the tip of a pencil while I dragged it across a page. I loved staring at a sentence and willing it to be better. Erasing entire paragraphs and moving them up or down or into oblivion. I loved constructing and creating the perfect phrase. There was an aggressive yet methodical beauty to writing. It was poetry but it wasn't poetry poetry. And that's the problem, I think.
I began to lean towards the poetry poetry of writing. It became less about saying something and more about wrapping something up in layers of pretty language. More about expression than articulation. Don't get me wrong: I love pretty language. I love that it can be clever and sexy and serious and whimsical at the same time. There are so many goddamn words and the ability to manipulate them like Tom Cruise with his magical computer gloves in Minority Report is real fuckin' neato. Part of me likes to think that leaning towards such flowery eloquence might have actually molded me into a decent poet. I've written a few rhymes I'm proud of. But the more I reflect on it, the more I wish I'd never fallen for it.
My work in school started suffering. My instructors still called me brilliant but they also called me reckless. My gleaming tiers of A-minuses became a haggard moshpit of D-pluses. I was constantly warned to follow the rules...that the strength of my ideas was hardly enough on which to hinge my sloppy, frenetic writing. And so I dropped out of school, exclaiming in protest that they had beaten my love of writing out of me. For most of the time since then, I've been working and too distracted by either stress of a job or the effortlessness of a consistent social life to think about writing. Besides, my love of writing was a crumpled husk locked in the boiler room where all enthusiasm goes to die in college, right?
But in the past two months I've been unemployed and burdened with an overabundance of insufferable free time. The battleworn gates of my mind have been flung wide open and I have nothing to deal with for sixteen hours a day but a brutal vortex of my own thoughts. And where there are thoughts there are emotions. I used to subscribe to this idea that feelings weren't real. That they were these imaginary impulses cooked up by your brain to add some sort of context to existence. Because existence really doesn't make much sense without a bit of context. But now with my head so well-ventilated and unguarded, my emotions are like a collection of uncooked Kobe beef cutlets suspended in wax paper in a massive atrium at the center of my mind. And my thoughts are like a razorwire tornado. See, usually the emotions are strung up in there with all the shutters locked tight and the violent swarm of thoughts are like a forcefield orbiting the locked down vault. An emotion might try to escape every now and then, but the thoughts surge and flow so rapdily and so sharply that the emotions can't get through. But with no distractions--nothing to really concentrate on--my thoughts are just spinning through my emotion vault without a care in the world, nicking and tearing at my poor hopeless emotions.
Anyhow, I think that in spite of how emotional I've been in the past several weeks, some of my thoughts are finally starting to figure themselves out and make their way out of the vault. There are still stragglers...I've probably still got another week or two of moody introversion in me...but the process has been initiated and eventually all of those thoughts will be free and circling the abandoned Tower of Emotions once again. And that--and this is the point of this whole post--is when I will love writing again.
A couple years ago I went through a psychotic emotional process very similar to what I've gone through in the past week (the material-set-aside I alluded to...I'll get to it in another post shortly) and afterwards I shut down emotionally and became an amazing writer. Or at least I improved from where I was at then. I stopped stealing ideas from other writers and comedians and developed my own voice: the voice that worked so well for me in college. And I think soon, with some practice, I will be back there. Maybe I'll improve or evolve further, or perhaps I'll simply just rediscover that voice. I'll try to incorporate the poetry poetry into this new voice if I can, but either way, I intend to melt back into the bitter, cynical, brilliant asshole that I used to be.
So this is my declaration of intent. I intend to give up on the vulnerability for a while. I'm going to shut down and I'm going to close up and I'm going to hate. Because it was so fun to hate. I'm going to observe people and I'm going to watch shitty reality TV. I'm going to stop growing in order to grow up. Because I'm tired of trying to find my way. It was so much easier to just hate and drift. My opinions were a raft and life just sort of passed around me. Now I'm so entirely out of touch with my own ideas and life is this overwhelming labyrinth and I want to drift again. So yeah...hopefully that works.
Otherwise what the fuck else am I supposed to do?
