Flannery O Connor as a child. Click for photo credit
This was written about a year ago…a quite smitten essay-in-progress telling of one of my greatest loves. Don’t be grossed out, ok??
I think I’ve always thought of myself as a writer. When I was young and imagining my grown up life, I tried on many roles but was most loyal to an ideologically indulgent portrayal of The Writer.I cast myself from the faint images of every literary heroine I knew: girls with wild spirits and ideas that they would share in well-worn leather bounded books. Their voices were feathery echoes during each late night spent filling notebook after notebook with the characters and places – borrowed and imagined – that I loved so much.
I wanted to be them and write like them, too, until my fingertips rubbed raw, until there were flickering splotches that jumped on and off the paper. It didn’t matter what I was writing about, or who I was writing for because it was the act in itself which entertained my young fantasies. In them, I imagined myself at my desk for hours every day, pausing every so often to stretch my tired limbs – fingers most of all - or to pace back and forth in deep contemplation, oblivious to things like dust mounds and hungry mice that, in my future life, would cover the most neglected spaces of my implausibly tiny apartment. I imagined the thrill of completing my first novel and holding the sum of its pages; the literal weight of my own words in my bare hands. Never did I imagine fortune or fame or even lukewarm admiration. I wrote for me, for the torturous and never quite complete pleasure that writing gave me.
There was no one else like me, I thought, or no other small human like me who would want to sit over a desk and think of words, and write words, and pour over them with delicate and delicious precision. Now I jadedly identify this cliche as a yet unjaded writer’s narcissism, a trait too typical and antiquarian to admit to, though I’ll admit, it still exists. Rarely is love like this void of ego. And I could compose an entire love story on my relationship with writing. I can say, unabashedly, it’s one of the longest, the most wonderfully fulfilling yet agonizing; and certainly, the most personal I have had, too. It grows with me, alongside me, and during work that’s felt like the most exciting thing I’ve come up with, it is a few big steps ahead of me.
Joan Didion at work. Click for photo credit.
Collin
February 17, 2011
Hey, I enjoyed this post, a lot. You should realize that others who have a passion for writing envy your talent — others not so far away.
At the risk of making another “cliche,” I’d invite you to NOT look at your dreams and aspirations as just that (cliches), but yet, something that is very attainable. If you look at the cards you’ve been dealt, there are probably very few people who have more potential. You’re smart, intuitive, worldly, educated, passionate, empathetic, creative, white, American and beautiful. Throw a little determination, hard work and sacrifice into that equation, and you’ve got success and fulfillment. You also have the opportunity to move to NYC, arguably the center of the universe for everything imaginable, especially writing. Use those cards and play them right, and all will fall into place.
See you in a couple weeks
-c