Guess who’s back? Me, again. Please don’t exit out!
I’ve learned a lot about writing and who I am as a writer in the last three months. I took my first writing class that I hated for a month and a half. I would constantly text my roommate and come home to lie on my floor and cry. There was a very familiar nagging feeling in me that my writing was this funny little dream of mine and I’m dumb, and maybe I am. I was writing more than ever and I spent so much time curating these perfect poems for class, and then lying about how I wrote them in five minutes because I wanted to seem cool. I didn’t want to be the one girl who cared way too much about this random English class, but here I am caring way too much. Anyway, about halfway through, I wrote a poem called ‘Joy.’ This was also the time I started seriously looking into journals and thinking ‘okay, maybe i can do this shit.’ So, here I am, doing said shit.
A lot of times for the arts, breaking into the scene seems scary. I once read the article ‘Who is the Bad Art Friend?’ (Side note: if you haven’t read it, you should. It’s amazing. Bad Art Friend) and it freaked me out. I thought, ‘OMG here’s these professional writers talking shit and I’m just a teenage girl.’ It’s like being an actor in this random improv class being convinced you’re the one who’s going to make it on SNL. But I stripped back the things that scared me about writing and looked at the bare bones of what I loved. It hit me I love this too much to let it go because I’m scared. I’m just a girl who likes stories more than the average person. So, that’s what I’m going to do. Write and have fun.
I started blogging more and sat my poet hat down for a while. Poetry became daunting after getting a few journal rejections I wasn’t sure how to deal with. Fiction welcomed me back home, and I found new characters to fall in love with. I started going back to my novel ideas after months of not touching them. Writing became me talking about the things I wanted to say. Ideas that I thought would be fun to write about. Now, I’ve picked up my poet hat again and started writing character poems. After one good poem, it all came back to me.
This entire thing is me breaking out of my comfort zone and going for things that interest me and weird me out. I get to write about Little Women gone cray and teaching writing, which is super fun and I would write a book on writing. I’m not technically qualified—I think I deserve an honorary doctorate…considering I have read To Kill A Mockingbird—but I love writing so much that it doesn’t matter. Not sure if I’ll have another writing class where I get to write weird shit and be rewarded for it (God, I hope so.)
A few days ago, I talked to my roommate about feeling out of place. I’m doing professional things where I’m interviewing important people, but I’m also going to the movies twice a week and writing movie reviews about how hot guys are. I’m going to a guest lecture and then crying on a street corner. There’s some real imbalance. Roommate called it the difference between kid shit and big kid shit, which is true. This is me experiencing limbo for the first time. (Trying to write about it, but it’s coming out as marital issues?) I think that’s where I should leave it until the next time I want to get sappy about writing, which will be next week.
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