Writing About Writing

 "When the lights go out, will you take me with you

And carry all this broken bone

Through six years down in crowded rooms

And highways I call home?

It's something I can't know 'til now
'Til you pick me off the ground
With a brick in hand, your lip-gloss smile
Your scraped-up knees, and

If you stay, I would even wait all night
Or until my heart explodes
How long until we find our way
In the dark and out of harm?
You can run away with me
Anytime you want"

~Summertime by My Chemical Romance

This post is an amalgamation of stuff I've been feeling about the way I've changed as a writer of small nothings over the years that I've been writing my blog. Before I go any further, I would like to add that a copy of this article will be put up on my Scrollstack so you can check me out on that platform as well.

I was a teenager who was dealing with raging hormones when I started this blog and I found a safe space in it and whatever came to mind got dropped here. I've spoken a lot about the hills and plateaus of my life through this medium and I've gotten a lot of support, not just from family, friends and acquaintances but also from people who are total strangers. Some posts worked and some did not and as I continue on this journey a lot of stuff will change. The brain of a 16 year old has now become the brain of a 26 year old after all.

I think the biggest challenge for me was swallowing my ego when people said something I wrote was good and telling them that I appreciated that they liked what I was writing but would they please tell me how I could get better? 

And then...I started reading Anna Karenina and my mind just went kaput. How could a human being come up with something so amazing? It was ethereal. I turned my attention to Bernard Shaw and Ernest Hemingway and suddenly I was afraid.

After seeing what these people had done with permutations and combinations of 26 letters I was terrified. A part of me felt and knew that I'd never be as good. I contemplated shutting the blog down and I went through a sort of ostrich with head in the sand business for a while.

Then, a dormant part of me suddenly awoke and said to me one day that I do not have to be as good as Hemingway or Shaw. I have to be as good as me and get better at being me. I recalled this scene from M*A*S*H, where Sherman Potter tells someone who is suicidal that the part of us that wants to hold on is stronger than the part of us that wants to let go.

What I'm getting at is this- there will always be a part of me that will try to discourage me or warn me that I might have bitten off more than I can chew, but there will be a part of me that will whisper or scream at me to just shut up and try.

And I will try. That is all.

The Bilge Master