Why does the self hatred come on with such severity, so unprompted, so unwarranted, so thick as deep mud?
You cannot trace me as I trace others through their body of work. The vast majority of my work lays unfinished, unedited, unfulfilled and in some places collapsed by outside events.
Or perhaps you can. Some of my work has left me, the rare bits of the graphomania that found resolution before the quickening or the fire left me, and slipped into the world. There is more of it there than I think.
Have I damned myself in defining myself so hard as a writer, given how little it feels like I finish? Where my ambition gets the better of me and I can never follow through, or my neurodivergence starves me of the tools and kindling I need to finish even the smallest of acts? I do not know, I do not know.
And to borrow turns like those, to let others bleed into me. Have I done nothing original? Am I treading paths already worn by others, making myself seem interesting because I step strangely along the trail? Trapped into furrows of others' word choices and concepts, have I crafted anything truly my own?
Or am I too far out, where things are too far fetched, where weird word choices and a refusal to adhere to conventions leaves my work scattered, unreasonable, unreadable, unparseable? Do I need to go back to fundamentals, learn discipline that I have so sorely lacked for so long? Am I just not as good as I think I am?
Where is the line between prose and poetry? I cannot see it sometimes, I'm not being lyrical enough, or my meter is inconsistent.
A body of work from a piece of work whose body sometimes doesn't work.
I spend more time writing about my writing or lack thereof than I do writing! Poisonous solipsism! Do I so lack empathy for others? Damaged brain, where self referential pronouns drop because a spectre of selfishness, real or no, looms and chokes and smothers words before ink hits page or fingers hit keys. How can this mutt speak without making it about itself? It cannot distinguish where these lines are between expressing empathy and centering itself, which furthers isolation and self-loathing.
Would that I could split myself, like a child smacking a palm onto a chocolate orange, to hand the slices to friends and loved ones and contemporaries and to myself, and let that chocolate be a mix of us, each headmate, so that everyone could have the version of me they need. Chain these slices together, so that we might share to ourselves all these lives that now we only live fragments of, tied to a miserable physical job and scattered mentally as we are, letting everyone down because we fear the plague we are sure we caught 2 years ago left us mentally weaker, a part of us stripmined by a virus we never had a test to confirm we caught.
I used to be better at stepping outside of myself. Something broke in me somewhere along the way and I've been tracing the wires but I can't find the fault that keeps tripping breakers. We've been considering anti-depressants, but we're still hot off quitting recreationals and there's still scorch marks on the wall and a melted circuit breaker from the last time we tried antidepressants and suffered the worst side effect those can give you.
Constantly worried we lost what talent we had. Constantly worried we never had it to begin with. Constantly worried I do still have it, and I'm wasting it. Constantly frustrated with myself for having clinical depression, ADHD, and anxiety. Constantly frustrated with Diabetes, a GI tract that hates me, and the insomnia when it rears its ugly head. Constantly frustrated with a world where I can't make a living off of writing. Constantly everything.
I have to take on faith that my body of work has helped people, that people like it, that people are eager to see more.
I have never been good at faith.
Maybe I just need fresh air, water, and sunlight. We don't think of ourself as plantlike, but maybe we should.
I peel this little monologue from its document like shucking an ear of corn, and toss it out into the world, so that someone else may feed a little off the meal that is my body of work.
