broken pipes and dreams
[Reposting from the other blog as a pathetic explanation of why I haven’t written anything lately. At least I can admit to my problems.]
somedays
Somedays are harder than others. Somedays I don’t feel so controlled, more at the mercy of memory which informs me of endless repeated mistakes. I stare at blank pages absolutely paralyzed. Somedays writer’s block is real, and I have no idea how to break down the wall between the story I need to tell and the page which needs to hear it first. Somedays I feel like a pathetic joke, just another foolish child who thinks she knows what she’s doing. In my mind is a vision of a future me, hunched in a shithole apartment, complaining and complaining about circumstances I refuse to change, just like the people I can’t stand. Somedays I’m not strong, and nothing I’ve accomplished thus far is enough. Somedays I don’t want to get out of bed, knowing all I will see is another dead-end chance. I know what I must do, but I can’t find the strength of will to stick to a decision which I must somedays regret. Somedays aren’t mine at all.
It
Sadness seeps just beneath my fragile exterior, mostly invisible but occasionally threatening to scratch the surface. Weeks pass, stakes rise, but it’s the smallest of moments that break me. A montage, the imperfect reflection of what I want so badly but will never truly grasp, some grand existential Thing that’s just beyond my reach. Every day I tell myself It’s not important, that I don’t need It—in fact, I’m one of the few lucky bastards who recognize that It’s all bullshit to distract us from some purer calling. I’m not quite sure what The Truth is, but sometimes when I’m weak, when I’ve had a beer (or two), when an images catches me just at that vulnerable moment, I want It too. All the Wanting I spend so much energy denying just explodes out of me, and there it is, I’m just another girl who dreams too big.
[r]evolutionary
You’re supposed to be writing the last paper of your undergraduate career, but instead you’re going through your tumblr archives, ostensibly looking for that time your prof agreed to go to drag night with the class, and somehow you get so distracted that you forget what you were doing. All of a sudden you’re on an adventure inside yourself and you realize how far you’ve come; how your ideas have evolved to become more concrete, how your passions have narrowed and hardened and your eyes are set on a goal you can barely even pronounce, but it’s right there and you can taste it. You’re graduating on Saturday, leaving all of this behind, but you’re not really leaving. You’ll carry all of it with you, all those times you sat in class and your mind was blown by a fellow student’s unique perspective, all those times you went to a professor’s office to talk about a paper and ended up talking about your future goals, all those times those same professors encouraged you to never stop fighting. And while it might seem like a waste, those hours you slaved over modernists and romantics and poststructuralists and feminists, you know that each one of them made you stronger, leaving an indelible mark of their genius upon you. Maybe you’re just a kid about to be released in the big wide world. Maybe your dreams are too big for you to grasp right away. Maybe you’ll end up stuck in shitty retail jobs for a decade with nothing to show for yourself. But if there’s one thing you’ve learned all these years, it’s that you have to keep fighting, because the fight is worth it all.
