In Which I Question All My Life Choices

Hello again.

It's been a while since my last post. I've been struggling with... I suppose you could call it writer's block? Although I think it's something more like writer's existential crisis. I haven't been struggling to come up with ideas; I've been despairing of ever doing these ideas justice.

It all began with a story I planned to write this summer. It was a kind of allegory which I had at first intended to be a poem, but then decided to turn into a dreamlike, Kafka-esque narrative. I began to work on it in the quiet of a mostly abandoned college library. I was actually quite proud of it at the time. It was one of the few times that I have completely lost myself in a story as I wrote. I had a vague outline, but for the most part I allowed events to unfold as they would. I spent two evenings on this story, made more or less pleasing progress, and then set it aside for a while.

A few weeks passed, I think, before I opened that file again. I decided to read over what I had written thus far, so as to enter once more into the atmosphere of the story before writing the ending. I wish that I had never done this. I wish, in fact, that the gods would have struck my computer with a divine virus wiping that file out of existence before I could review it.

I suppose it is only a person with very fragile self-esteem who could find a poorly written story enough reason to question their entire life's meaning. But I did. I spent the next few nights having mild panic attacks as I imagined my future snapping shut in my face.

What bothered me about the story was not so much that it was poorly written. I do not know how to describe it, other than that it was entirely bad. I had tried to make it realistic, and had failed miserably. I had tried to make subtle, witty comments about society, but had ended in sounding whiny, bitter, and painfully obvious. The surreal, subtly creepy events which were supposed to be the story's driving force were barely noticeable. In short, I was not disillusioned after reading it; I was shattered. 

I began to question everything about myself. I viewed my inability to interact with the world through creative writing as a fundamental inability to understand it. I feared that my terrible story was further evidence of the intellectual deficit I have always suspected in myself, which would not only keep me from writing, but would keep me from doing anything of worth. For a short time, I frantically reviewed story and poetry ideas that I'd conceived in the past, trying to console myself, perhaps redeem myself, with a shred of creativity exhibited at some point in my life. I worked on poems, I wrote a story outline, I reviewed a piece of flash fiction I'd written recently. But each time I sat down to write-- in fact, each time I even thought about writing-- I felt a pain as if I were reopening a poorly healing wound. This feeling extended to most other activities. Any interaction I had with others, whether it be through reading, listening to music, or conversation, only brought me a sickening feeling of inadequacy. All I could think to myself was how intelligent, how well-read, how creative, and how thoughtful every other creature on the earth was, and to what pitiful degree I was not any of these things.

Nothing would please me more than to be able to describe how, one night, perhaps under the light of a full moon, some enormous insight pierced through the dark place in my mind, and I suddenly knew that I was not stupid and base, that I had merely been doing something wrong in one particular area of my life which could be easily remedied. I wish that I could tell you how I stumbled upon some quote by a great and celebrated figure which gave me hope, or how someone gave me positive and affirming advice which brought me out of my misery.  But this is not an inspirational story. What really happened was that my bad mood subsided somewhat, I got really into researching vampires, and I've been struggling with the same thoughts on and off on a much less threatening scale. I've still been writing, and have had a few new ideas of late, which has been vaguely comforting. I have also determined that, if I stop writing for fear of writing something "bad", then I will never learn how I can do better.

So that is the long-winded story of my latest existential crisis. In other news, I changed the title of my blog to something more fitting. Also, I have finally replaced the picture of Theda Bara with one of yours truly-- quite a feat for me, because moving pictures from my phone to my computer seemed unimaginably complex. Actually, when I tried to set it as my profile, Google told me that people might not recognize the picture because there didn't seem to be a face in it. Thanks, Google. I like your face, too.