230323 - On conditional identity
This month, I went to an award ceremony for a program that gave writing scholarships to people. I didn’t get one, but I did get an honorable mention, which I was unreasonably semi-upset about.
Soon enough, I realized exactly why I hadn’t scored higher on the talented-writer-scoreboard; the authors who won read their works. They were spectacular. Things I had never thought about before I was forced to digest though their intricate patterns of words, and they were so articulate. Often, I find my writing leans towards obfuscation, I mask what I want to say behind massive walls of projective parable and call it “poetry”. I learned today that this pales in comparison to stability within writing, a sort of certainty that makes you proud and willing to read and share. I quickly became insecure. Who am I, to show up to this meeting full of authors who call themselves a writing community, who don’t hide their writing in a notes document relying on the power of iCloud storage, who can take criticism and not go home and start crying when someone tears down those barriers of ambiguity, informing you that their conclusion is that your writing is simply self-destructive ideals hidden behind fancy words.
I felt impossibly jealous, immature, and ashamed. I call myself a writer, a poet, but if I couldn’t coherently enunciate my thoughts within a realm of “awardable” clarity, what am I really doing? I write for myself, creating disfigured mutations of words that I purposely make difficult to sort through. I hide on purpose, I realized.
I don’t share much of my writing anymore. The first reason is that I am terrified to the bone of criticism. As a child, I wrote constantly. I had writer friends, I was part of the aforementioned writer community, I went to camp, I did all the things that these people I saw at the award ceremony did. But through the pandemic and my looming issues with loneliness that quickly led to mental illness, I abruptly stopped writing things that I felt were palatable, sharable, things I could send to my teachers and get criticism for. They were far too personal. Criticism for things I called my emotions, my expression, my only outlet simply felt too inappropriate. Thus, I stopped improving. I kept writing, obviously — I’ve written over three hundred poems in the last year and a half, but none of them have been put up in front a panel of critical writers since I was ten, and now I’m too cowardly to approach the professional career path of a writer again after a long, tiring break.
That’s another reason why I was ashamed. I knew that every winning piece had been criticized, redone, shared, and gone through the entire glorious writing process. I didn’t know why I was upset about my prize, at that point — I suddenly felt undeserving of the honorable mention that I received. Obviously, I was very upset. I felt like a huge part of my identity had been rescinded from me, like I had been a faker carrying around this label for years and years and almost convincing myself that it was true.
Another component of the mortifying award ceremony was going up to the microphone and saying your name, grade, and five words as to why you write. Now, don’t get me wrong: I am a debater. I public speak all the time. I speak in public, that’s my main activity and something I devote almost every weekend to (getting locked in a high school and having a shouting match at a myriad of students in suits). That’s why I could not tell you why I was so damn scared getting up on that microphone and explaining “why I write”. I think my brain was unravelling as I wracked by mind for a reason. I ended with “I write to catalogue my memories” — which is six words, but no one was counting after a senior went up and said a one-minute speech.
As I stared at my phone on the drive back (note: I was not the one driving. I am not old enough.), I contemplated my annoying obsession with talent while reading Gideon the Ninth, which is a very good book and my greatest obsession at the moment, and concluded that even if I wasn’t mass-producing publishable writing, I could still be a writer. The reason being that, in my self-deprecating spiraling daze, I literally googled “writer” and came out with this:
I mean, I guess I’ve written a particular text. I’ve written a lot of particular texts. Another one I got was “a person who writes books, stories, or articles as a job or regular occupation” — that was interesting. I didn’t think that a lot of the writers in the award ceremony wrote as an occupation, partly because none of us have made it to college yet, meaning we are mostly still economically reliant on our parents. So either all of us (writing a particular text) are writers, or none of us (writing as an occupation) are writers. It doesn’t really matter that much.
I hope that one day us child writing prodigies that fell off extra hard get a special party with a lot of candy and sugary drinks. I honestly think we deserve it. It’s such a hard thing to accept, that ten-year-old you could outpace anything you do now. To recognize that the author who told me to “never stop writing” would be disappointed now, because I did stop. To acknowledge that you are flawed, that praise doesn’t amount to anything because it’s conditional. I think my fresh-from-the-womb brand of unbridled fictitious storytelling is probably not going to come back. But it’s fine. I just really want some chocolate right now.