Done With What We've Lost

When you write (as in, label yourself a writer), there is a natural cycle to it. You begin, and the thoughts and the words come, and things go well. You start to have delusions of grandeur. A lot of people stop here, caught up too far in their pleasant daydreaming to go any further, but there are a few who are more ambitious. They are willing to read what they have written, and they read it critically. They read it to peers. They read it aloud, alone in their bedrooms, or to audiences. And they read what others have written, aloud, to themselves, in the quiet, where nothing can stop the flow of better words than their own.

It is at this point that the writer hits a kind of wall. He realizes that everything he writes is absolute garbage. He wants to give up. Many people that saw themselves through the delusional stage stop here, afraid to go on. They perhaps do not know that there is another stage in the cycle.

A stage of bitter, hard-won, small improvement. You listen to what the critics have to say; you make changes. A line or two produce themselves, and they aren't so very bad. So you put something together, and you smile at it, and you start the cycle all over again.

I'm in the middle stage, right now. I've been there before, and I know I'll come out again. But for now, I'm mostly just discouraged. What's not helping is that this self-awareness of the extreme suckage of my writing has bled over to everything else, including academic writing. Including the three papers I have (had?) due this week. So if I sound a little despondent, it's probably because I've been scribbling "You are a piss-poor poet" in my notebook over and over again. It's also probably because a person I considered to be a pretty good friend of mine (if not always a pretty good person), told me that our friendship had been filler until he could find himself better "friends" ("friends" meaning, in this case, "hot girls to date"). Add to that the other items of drama that are constantly fluttering about me, and, well, it's getting to be more than I want to handle.

I honestly can't believe I just admitted that. I might be getting better after all.