Current mood:

satisfied

"I'll wait for you"
U2 on a Sunday morning is like a drug that strengthens your heart while turning your brain to mush. How I wish to lose myself in the physical emotions...

But this isn't about U2. It's about progress. It's about evolution. It's about writing (when do I ever post anything anymore that isn't about writing?).

So I was working on the three papers I have due tomorrow. Listening to music on winamp with the inherited headphones that make everything sound so fucking delicious and I didn't want to leave yet. Who would? So I think "let's read some crap." Unfortunately I've reread all of the crap in the documents folder very recently and so it's no incentive to sit still. Instead I mosey over to DA and read the first things I submitted. Some I don't have to read--Just looking at the preview I remember perfectly and get the taste that I was hungry for.
The younger years. The crazy bad. The experimentation with authorial identity. It's simultaneously interesting and embarrassing all at once. I'm not sure how I ever manage to get past it.

But then I start thinking about who I am now. I look at one of the people I, back then, thought of as a real Writer. Someone who impressed my young impressionable mind and intimidated me in a creative way. And for a moment I regress. I become the insecure self-demeaning little girl that I, in some ways, will always be.
Shake it off. Read a little. Realize that it's not so different after all.
[have we just sprung the little green shoots of an ego? soon to turn ravenous vine and strangle the parts of me we all hold so dear?]

Sure. I sucked. And sure. I probably still do more often than not.
But now I'm capable. Capable of playing on the same field. Capable of drawing those feelings from myself--I don't have to run off to someone else's prose to feel that wicked power of creation. I can do it right at home with nothing more than a notebook and a sexy black pen.

So yeah. I'm a writer. I'm a writer and fuck you if you think it's pretentious of me to say so--it's not an easy thing to submit in a journal entry even when the only people who read it already consider me such. I write. And that, in itself with no other qualifications makes me a writer. I love it. That, truly, is what makes me a Writer. I revel in it like Dionysus. Drunk on creation that reminds me of every typed word that I have ever fallen in love with. I giggle. I moan. I mourn. The relationship finally consummated with my admission of guilt. I am a writer.

Listening to the sexiest song I'll ever hear (Physical-NIN), I'm tempted to go on to my voice and the voices that I love. To get into the parts that get me off in a non-sexual way. To talk about the physicality of writing that I really love. The way I can feel it in my mouth when I'm reading silently on a bus. The way it tickles up my side and makes me feel full.

Honesty and all that lust you're after.

I once was blind but now I see---something like that? I was weak and still have weakness but the fact of the matter, the one thing we'll remember at the end of today, is the fact that my writing has grown strong (and maybe a little subversive because of all the resent I've been pouring over it for the last seven years). I've carved a little niche for my writing to fester in and it glories in the dark corner. Poetry has soaked into prose and given me a style that I can finally recognize as no small anomaly--they were right to talk about it when I was crying WTF.
More fun than that is my ability now to look back on piles of mediocre bullshit (not by their standards but solely my own) and see little pieces of it sticking out. The strokes that fell outside of the lines. The notes that fucked up the sappy melody. The beast.

hehe.
The beast.

Yeah. So. That's that, I guess. Really I think the heart of all of this ... all of this return to past versions of myself, concentration on writing, failure to fear the future ... I think at it's heart all that's really happening is I'm finally growing sick of my inferiority complex. Or maybe not the inferiority complex so much as the self-depreciation. I am who I am. Why should I waste my life lamenting that fact? The people I love most love me for the person who drowns under the self-hatred. Argue for her rescue. Don't understand why I'd bare my teeth and snarl at such an unworthy target.
So I'm me.
And I think I'm finally starting to accept that fact. (Maybe this is part of growing up that I've never sufficiently mastered)

I'm a hell of a lot easier when I'm not shitting on myself all the time and we all know how much I love to be the easier version--the one who's carelessly happy and easily forgiving.

And I can feel the difference.

Maybe that's all that matters.

I can really fucking feel the difference.