Saturday, October 11, 2008

Things are better.

It’s been an incredibly dark year. We’re talking deaths, near fatal illnesses, and even an attempted suicide or two. The stars were just aligned bad. A combination of depression, medication, and chronic pain that medication can’t touch made writing and art impossible…I may as well have spent the last several months dead, I would have produced just as much and likely smelled a good bit better (I’ve learned, I do not shower near as much when depressed and ill).



Words are flowing now though, it’s no longer just the want and urge to write myself out of the hole I am in, but rather I’ve finally reclaimed the drive to do so. For a brain that has been locked up for so long, the sudden flurry of ideas is almost overwhelming, and probably more worthy of a meth binge than the gallons of coffee I plan to marinate in until I get everything in place.


Since 95, I have been in a perpetual state hesitance, I have several novels done or very near completion, and I have done nothing with them…I sit on them, share a few chapters here and there and then lock them away for a mythical day when I might know more, be better, be able to work them over to make them something worth selling. I’m not waiting for a perfect day anymore, I’m not waiting for a perfect me, this is it, this is all I’m going to get, and I need to make a go of it while I am still unwrinkled and unwithered enough to call myself young.


As of now, my mother is the only other person in the world to ever have read all my novels, and I realized recently that I was writing all this time just for her, just for her approval…it was enough to satisfy. Not only is that selfish, but it’s also sad…especially when I’ve spent the last eight months feeling like all that was gone, no more mommy to excitedly read over my work and pat me on the head. Just two ten year olds who think the world of everything I do, and while great cheerleaders they make, literary critics they are not. It was miserable and it was bleak, and it left me feeling as though I could have taken over a decade of works and simply lit fire to them, for anyone who really would have cared was already past being able to.


Pathetic. I know.


And maybe I have too big an ego, but I truly feel people will like what I have to offer, if I ever offer it, if I ever show more than just the work I don’t care about. Because I do that, nothing that matters to me has ever made it to print, to the net, to the hands of anyone who would or could be impressed besides my mother, my number one fan. Selfish and cowardly. I have more to give the world than a splattering of erratic blog posts and Photoshop doodles. I have real art. I have real emotions and views of the world captured in fiction that I need to trust the people of the world enough to share with them.


That’s really what it comes down to, an inherent mistrust of those I don’t know, and even those I do, of those who I can not with perfect accuracy predict their reactions and actions. An overwhelming want to be accepted and maybe even loved, when I come from a little bubble in the world where acceptance is more rented than owned, loaned to you for brief spaces of time and ripped away the instant you are vulnerable. The people I love most in the world are also the monsters under my bed, in my closet, lurking and waiting with pretty baited smiles to rend flesh from bone, to eviscerate me emotionally, spiritually, and from time to time even physically. It has a way of making a person prefer insulation, isolation, a safe little island within oneself to be blissfully inert for how long, no one cares.


I have to learn to simply offer myself and take what acceptance is given, and simply dismiss what acceptance is taken from me for being who I am. It’s what I would tell my children, and I would expect them to do what makes them happy, to be productive in spite of whatever world their find themselves in. I can’t simply just tell them that though, it’s empty words without actions behind them, so…I’m going to get my shit together for myself, so that my kids will be able to one day use the example and do the same..

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