hey, blog. this is a flash memoir that i wrote on a whim, and i decided to use it as my blog for the month. warning–it is melodramatic and somewhat boring. i should be back to the regularly scheduled programming next month.
dear writing,
i’m sick of you. you’ve sucked the life out of me for years now. i’ve devoted everything to you without even realizing it. become a hollow shell of a human for the sake of you; and you don’t even care. why would you? you’re not real. you’re not my friend, not my confidante, and certainly not my therapist. just typing words right now makes me physically sick. i don’t know when that started, and i don’t care enough to figure it out.
my aunt asked me a few weeks ago what i planned to do with my writing after graduation, and i told her nothing. absolutely nothing. no novel, no poetry book, no play. nothing. the furthest my writing will go is what i’m doing right now–just scratching down how i feel. i’ll never submit anything again, never participate in an open mic, never share my writing. i don’t want to. i don’t need to.
she was disturbed. she said it would be a shame. we dropped the subject. a few days later, we were at a gathering with basically my whole family. while we were all sitting at the table, she made me say it in front of everyone. how sick i am of you. how apathetic and numb. they thought it strange. i smiled. writing is great–freedom is better.
i’ll always be a writer, really. just not one who writes. i’ll always have a mind full of ideas and visions and i’ll always record some of them. maybe eventually i’ll decide to make something of them. but writing in the traditional sense or with the goal of success just isn’t right for me. never was. i still love words and stories and creating characters–i just never want to sell myself out again.
so, i say goodbye to writing. not to words or my love for them. just to a rigid practice that has become too much for me. i say goodbye to deadlines and wordcounts and journals and submissions.
i say hello to a new way of being a literary artist. to healthy habits. to building my own worlds. to learning new tricks. to my own way.
