Yes, this will yet be another post writing about writing. But I can't help it! It's something I claim to be passionate about, yet I hardly make any time to improve or indulge in this "craft". It is an embarrassment, what I do, when I troll about friends' blogs or opinion columns marvel at how these people can (or mostly can't) create these works seemingly out of thin air--and yet I can't even cough up a decent blog post every month.
I always imagined it as such: I will be going about my daily routine, when an idea or an image or a feeling comes floating in an idyllic pace through my mind; and I frantically type out the words that I can extract from that beautiful, simple thought, only coming up for air or a cup of tea; and when I finish, I can see someone read it, and feel the same thoughts and think the same feelings as I have when that eureka moment came to pass me one fine afternoon; and I can see that I have reached a person or two, and touched his life for even a fraction of a second, from those words that I have painstakingly crafted and molded from thought. None of these has ever been.
I have always been led to believe that I possess a knack for rhetoric, but time and time again I have found hundreds of ways to believe that this isn't true. Persuasion and motivation have grown less and less of a skill for me, even more so when put into writing. Teachers, friends, and (of course) parents have been very applauding with how "skilled" I might have seemed to them. And lately, being around friends who wrote and critiqued gave a boost to my willpower and my ego. Once, I was even told that being close with a certain writer made me write better in my personal blogs. A stark causality, I admit; but a rather short-lived one at that. It seems that I cannot keep up with the demands of what I perceive a writer should be or make, that I work with a certain flavor that only comes up when certain emotions spike up. I don't even know why I write, I don't even know what or who I write for.
I have grown into the archetype of a cynic, a defeated romantic, a hopeless shell of a writer. I do not feel as defeated as Hemingway might have been toward the end of his career, but I feel like I have let myself down a lot. Fourteen years of writing haphazard essays and articles for school papers, local papers, journals, blogs, and school work have brought me into this limbo. Perhaps I never left that limbo, perhaps I only grew in the limited confines of that space and was always pushed back into the form of whatever that space could handle.
Louisa May Alcott will not have been proud of me. Neither would have Strunk and White (as this piece might be entirely rife with Elements of Style faux pas). I have not even made myself proud for whatever I have written. Most of what I have written was made out of pure requirement, and the lesser portion were to keep me sane from the daily entropy of my life. Countless people have told me I write well, and I probably should have studied to become a writer. The teachers even pulled me out of Karate Extracurricular Class and put me in the Junior Journalists' Program because they saw the potential in me. Fast-forward fourteen years later, I wonder: where is that potential? What happened to that spark? That light?
This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine. That light that people saw in the words that flowed out of my pen or word processor, I wonder what it must have seemed to them? Perhaps that light was never in me, but merely a reflection of whatever light other people had projected towards me. The moon must feel quite betrayed. How lonely must she feel, when its only beauty isn't even inherently hers.
How lonely it must be.
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