On Being A Writer
My boyfriend is an engineer, each day he shows up to labs to test the tensile strength of metals and write down rows upon rows of equations using words I sometimes swear he constructs on the spot - it’s my own personal hell to do what he does, but he adores it. Something about the one-track solutions, numbers shifting back and forth like sliding doors taking him to an answer safe and correct, satisfies his rational mind and keeps him breathing evenly. I love and admire the cog-like whirring of his pragmatic mind, he keeps me grounded, holds my feet just enough on solid ground that I do not hit my head on the glass-ceiling of my own ridiculously quixotic visions for my own existence. I am hardly unique in my identification with Sylvia Plath’s cult analogy of the fig tree. I am almost certain that every teenage girl who once cut her own fringe and found brief moments of solace in the haze of an incense stick has leafed through the pages of The Bell Jar and felt personally pierced by an arrow of recognition as Plath lays out the idea of life as a fig tree, with every possibility ripe and for the taking, before the fatigue of choice rots the fruits (and eventually the mind) and each purple sphere drops dejectedly to earth, and jammy youth seeps into the ground to feed the dreams of the next generation who pray they will not succumb to the same fate. I have wanted many things for myself, the first dream I remember was to be a librarian, the prospect of life with books appliqued on my eyeline seemed like bliss- surprisingly I also moved through phases of scientific endeavour, wanting to be a meteorologist, an astronomer, even briefly aspiring to perform autopsies but being assuaged by the necessity of first working with the living. Words though, lived safely nestled in my fantasies throughout it all.
The first sentence I was ever proud of contained the word ‘malodorous’. I was twelve years old completing the mandatory creative writing portion of my primary school’s end of term assessments. This little gem I had forged in my own mind made me smile, and glint on the inside in a way I had not felt before, and though I did not think it had the power to bring these reactions upon others, I was content enough to have felt it for myself. My teacher (a near deity in my eyes) circled it in her green pen signalling approval and success, and next to it wrote ‘excellent’ in her slanted hand that oozed wisdom and wit. I was changed, in one swift loop of her pen, I had been made a writer. From that moment onwards I chased the feeling, gathering words like flowers and stringing them stem by stem together, sentences adorning my neck and scenting my fingertips. It was like a high, to have bent language to my will into something raw and beautiful, and then to be reminded by everyone I flashed it to that yes, it was in fact something to behold. In the early days, I would write abstractly about people and visions outside of my own internal world. If anything of my psyche had slipped through the lines on the printer paper, it was not my decision to have let it. And yet, I could not take criticism; corrections spelled out in red were like bullets or blunt force blows to my body, to me they were not nudges towards betterment, they were attacks on the very fibre of my being, highlighting fundamental flaws that littered my person and would never be liked.
When my life got messy and youth started to trickle out of my fingertips, I began to write about myself - squirrelled away in journals, on odd scraps of paper, or the notes page on my iPhone I would rid myself of whatever happened to plague my mind, spew it onto paper, inky, stinking of girlhood and less than beautiful. Writing like this was a necessity rather than a vocation, medicinal and purgative, something that could not be left long lest it fester and rot within me before it destructively burst away. These words I did not show people. They felt like the very blood pumping through my heart’s chambers- if it was exposed and flowing uncauterized, something was fatally wrong. It’s not that I did not like what I was writing, I was always proud when holding my bony jottings up to my eyes after finishing them, of the way I was able to translate the misery and anguish that ate away at me into something hauntingly pretty and worthwhile. Maybe if what I was creating had been uglier, I would not have started to feel the dissonance between the low-humming need to keep myself safely an enigma and the whistle-like yearning to be read and analysed There is something voyeuristic about writing, the need to be seen, sometimes to be believed, perhaps to be understood, but always to be marvelled at.
So I had decided I needed to be seen, the next plight of the writer was deciding how to be seen. I could hardly claw at my fragments, ball them up and wave them fruitlessly in faces, as much as I would have liked to. I used to say that my final ideal career was to die tragically young and have my works dug up, discovered caked in dust in a drawer, and spilled over by scholars and teenage girls, lamenting over wasted potential and the curse of the artist alive. I am now beginning to see the flaws in this plan. I needed to hone, carve out the imperfections in my work, would you expect a potter to fire a cup riddled with cracks? I tried my hand at any style I could, modelled myself into a poet, a playwright, a novelist; I would love for this sentence to have a neat conclusion, to say that I struck gold one day while delving into free verse and the rest was history, but I remain an ellipses of indecision. When people ask what I want to be now, I continue to throw out ‘writer’. When people ask what I write I say, whatever I can, whatever my hands will allow me. Writing is one of those strange occupations where you never leave the office, you could clock on in the middle of the night as the sheets move over your leg in a way that sparks something. If you do not answer this call of creation, it may leak like sand through a grasped fist; I mourn for words I’ve lost through distraction and sleep and often wonder how much more changed the world would be if every poet had never forgotten.
And what happens after? When the words are fixed to paper and an idea becomes a piece? There is a strange liminal period between the hand of the writer and the eyes of the first reader, a Berkeleyesque plea to know if a writer writes a poem that nobody sees, did they really write it at all? The bravery of writers is underestimated. Last time I wrote something, I first read it to my boyfriend. I could not bear to let him hold the page himself, I kept it in an iron grip so that I may censor at my will like covering parts of my body while I undress, reading it how I knew it to be read like positioning myself at my most flattering angle. He had seen every part of me before yet nothing came close to the nakedness I have felt as his eyes scan back and forth across pages that look just like the inside of me, my brain, my bones, my body. My works now are out in the open, on websites and in publications where I cannot shift the lighting they are viewed in or clarify myself in a frantic whispered footnote- I have to submit to the knowledge that once my writing is out of my hands, it no longer remains mine alone. I have come to understand that nobody will understand me in the way I understand myself, and despite this fact looming ghastly in its uncurbed independence, I have begun to see a beauty in it, in the notion that each person whose eyes linger over my sentences will draw from it a different essence, be changed in a new and unprecedented way as is the nature of human oddity. And is it not a privilege to create something that becomes a being in itself, and can come back to edit me as I edited it?
Edited by Roxy-Moon Dahal Hodson
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