June 17, 2009
I am interested in what other people have to say about love. Granted, I am more interested in reading about what they have to say about love than actually conversing about it. Maybe that’s akin to my aversion to talking about religion. I like reading about it, but it’s uncomfortable to talk about it.
But as I’m reading all of these New York Times pieces on Modern Love, and responding to them in what seems to be becoming my own series, love isn’t the flickering thing I am thinking about. I am thinking about how I want to be a writer.
Damn. My desire to be a writer is one of those deep and shameful truths that lies close to my bones. I keep it in the same place with my jealousy of my niece (me, twenty three, her, four), my resentment of my sisters’ exclusive friendship, my desire for real honest-to-God true love, and all of those other horrible, immutable true things I know about myself. Wanting to be a writer, though, isn’t an emotion in the same way that jealousy is. I could do something about it. Unfortunately, another one of those horrible truths that, ironically, sits right next to “Desire to be a Writer” is “I Really Like Security.” What self-respecting twenty-three year old person would be willing to admit that?
I like security because I grew up, in the sense that I spent the years from two to fourteen, in one comfortable house. My childhood in this sense was very different from my sisters’. I hate moving; one of my sisters feels like the walls are closing in if she stays somewhere more than two years, or so she told me several years ago. I am actively thankful for my healthcare: having been hospitalized about once a year for the past nine years with asthmatic episodes, not to mention needing three maintenance prescriptions a month, keeps me fully aware of how much I need it, and am thankful for it. I like to be comfortable, I like to be stable. I am the most boring twenty-something alive.
Except for that truth that lies close to my bones.
I have always written things. Things that in retrospect are horrifying and hilarious (I began my memoirs at age eight, to abandon them two weeks later), but nevertheless, the act was always there. Rilke understood the truth, and he said something like how if you ask yourself “can I not write?” and the answer is no, then you’re a writer. Fairly simple equation, right? As I’ve gotten older, my writing has moved (although not entirely) away from brief and repetitive fantasies of happiness towards a more confessional essay mode. It makes sense—I’ve also kept a journal since I was fourteen, so the streamlining of journal writing, inner-monologue, and internal ruminations was bound to take place eventually. Did I mention I’m lazy too?
So reading these New York Times pieces tugs on me—it tugs at my essays. I would not have the slightest idea of how to begin submission. I had a close encounter with publishing once, which ended up bitterly disappointing me at an already difficult time, so I am understandably gun shy. The writing is easy—it’s always been happening—but actually doing something with the writing is tempting and shamefully nauseating.
I worked in the special collections library my sophomore summer of college, and in cataloguing boxes, I became traumatized to think of some student, however many years later, cataloguing my box: my poor little poems, essays, journals, alone and cold in a box in a basement. That fear flared in me, and I became briefly adamant that I would pursue publication. I didn’t want to be Emily Dickenson.
I put together a “collection” of my own poetry. It was a strictly vain project: I wanted to see them all in one place. It is an interesting personal timeline—tracking from my Slam Poetry, which were valuable poems in an occasionally obnoxious medium, through my senior year writing class, many of which are colored by the death of a friend. I love that little “book,” in the binder I bought at the drug store on Main St. In time, I’ll probably put together another one, this time of essays.
Maybe I’ll figure out where to send it. Maybe I’ll just keep it on my shelf: ghosts next to real publications. And when I continue, as I inevitably will, to read essays at nytimes.com, I’ll see the ghosts of my own essays on the screen.
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