I am not a writer | Teen Ink

I am not a writer

June 12, 2013
By Anonymous

Words don’t come easily to me now, like they once did. Somewhere among puberty and high school and suicide attempts, all the words got trapped inside me, hiding in some forsaken corner of my mind among cobwebs and gray-speckled moths. I find myself not being able to write, cramped by this incessant fear that anything that I produce will not be good enough. Two, three years ago, this would never have happened to me. Back then, at twelve, thirteen years old, I was still naive enough to believe I could be a writer.

In my mind, being a writer was the perfect antidote to my problems. Instead of defining myself by the things I couldn’t change--my South Asian heritage, or my stammering problem, or my twiggy, curveless body--, I decided to define myself as a writer. I used to carry around little notebooks, with a pen wedged inside the wire spiral. Whenever I found myself lonely, I would write, write, write because it was my passion, my unique, idiosyncratic thing-that-I-do. My friends were constantly updated on the status of my stories: who was making out with whom, which suspect turned out to be the murderer, what the thief spent his stolen money on. When I had to introduce myself to a youth group during an icebreaker I held my chin up and said, “I’m a writer.”

And why shouldn’t I have identified as a writer? A writer, in my middle-school mind, was an artist of sorts, a person who can make beauty out of nothing, who can turn the simple act of putting words on paper into something elegant, something precious.

A writer can take ordinary letters, these plain curves and angles, and light them up with message, with meaning.

A writer is spontaneous. A writer will have thoughts that no one on Earth has ever had before, and transcribe them perfectly, translating the tune of an inner voice into notes on a sheet of music.

A writer understands the power of little details. A writer can strike a comma to give pause, or hold the words in midair with a hyphen and then -- ever so carefully-- drop them, like an orchestrator conducting a symphony, all the instruments working in poised perfection.
A writer is a mentor. A writer shines a light on life and shows you the way snow sparkles, the way the shadows across the floor form a pattern. A writer’s insights are lovely, useful things--you can keep them forever, tucked away on the mental shelf where you keep beautiful objects.

A writer is coherent. A writer is the master of emotions, the piano player on our hearts, evoking excitement or longing or a deep stirring from some dark unknown corners down inside. A writer is someone who can convince you of something, through the power of passion which leaks through their words.

A writer, most importantly, can never be lonely. Why would anyone be lonely when they have words to keep them company, words that can act as channels to distant worlds? Dialogue is ephemeral. Conversations sputter and die. Friendships fade. People you love become people you once loved. Words spoken between two people can never be reclaimed, no matter how much you strain to remember them years later. But the written word? It is forever.

I am not a writer.

Because when have I ever written anything that makes people’s hearts beat a little faster, or breathe a little easier? The words that I put on paper have never ever been more coherent than the words that stumble out of my mouth. My mouth that stutters for no reason, choked by the tight, full-body rushes of panic that come along with having social anxiety disorder. The anxiety wraps round my bones, cramping my movement, so that I am stiff, unreal. It’s as if I’ve been trapped in a glass box, maybe a coffin, a cage that is real to me but to no one else. I cannot speak, can hardly move. The words come out so soft and weak they are almost non-existent, like the beating of butterfly wings.
But on paper, I come alive. My classmates tell me reading my writing is the only way they know I have emotions. Writing, for my middle-school self, was the path to end my self-consciousness. I could not speak like the other kids my age, but I could write like them-- better than them, even. So I convinced myself of this fact and immersed myself in the written word.

Now I see it is all for nothing. I gather prompts, advice books, notebooks full of wide-ruled paper, but I don’t create. I have nothing to show, not one essay or story or poem that I can show as a proof of my writerliness. All I have are bits and pieces. Things I wrote once, scenes about girls in blue dresses fighting demons and wizards all the while rocking a pair of six inch heels, and poems about how fast time passes when you’re excited. I have a sentence here, a snippet of dialogue there--saved on my laptop, in old Chemistry notebooks and in the July pages of my school planner. It is all a kind of mental word vomit, taking out my emotions on the world through bad prose.

Calling myself a writer would be like calling a person who has never made a single necklace or bracelet a jewelry-maker. This person may own a tub full of cracked, discolored, glass beads, the kind that costs only $5 at Michaels because the beads are such bad quality. The holes are sometimes closed up with glass, and sometimes a few beads are fused together in weird lumps. Once or twice this wannabe-jeweler strung together a few mismatched beads on a fraying thread and called it a necklace. The knots were too weak and the necklace broke, sending the beads clattering one after another, clacking against the wood floor, rolling behind the bed and under the dresser.

Metaphors aside, the fact of the matter is that I cannot be someone I’m not. I won’t ever reach the standard which I wish to achieve. The writing life is not for me. I have whole lists of contests coming up in the next few weeks or months, and I can’t do it. The page always looms in front of me, blank and white, like the walls of an asylum cell. The words come out garbled, awkward, horrible--not the way I want them to, not the way a writer is supposed to sound.

And I’m thinking maybe it’s best if I stop hoping. Maybe it’s best if I grow up, squelch my childhood dreams, and forget I ever wanted to do this.

I’ll burn my notebooks. And ignore the way my fingers twitch in the middle of the night to the tk-tk-tk of keys on an invisible keyboard.
I am not a writer.

This is my mantra. I will repeat it until I believe it.



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This article has 9 comments.


on Aug. 11 2013 at 3:12 am
Z.Monika BRONZE, Dhaka, Other
2 articles 0 photos 7 comments

Favorite Quote:
&ldquo;I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.&rdquo; <br /> ― Vikram Seth, From Heaven Lake

So you can’t write anymore. But once, when you were a kid, you wished to become one. Why? You give tons of reasons. A writer is this, a writer is that. “Delightful”. I once read an interview of the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. And there he declaimed that there were times when he had difficulty making one of his characters come out of a room. At times like that, he cannot understand “how” to make his character do something.
So, you can safely assume, stuff like this happens to everybody. I don’t really like the repetitions of “a writer does this… a writer acts like this…” I just felt you could’ve written it in a more less-robotic way, if I can call it that. I liked the imagery you put n with the jewelry metaphor, but I have to advise you to not follow those with stuff like “metaphors aside, the...”
Because, it reads like you were telling us: ya, that jewelry thing was a metaphor, in case you didn’t get it. There are some grammatical errors e.g. “A writer is someone who can convince you of something, through the power of passion which leaks through THEIR words.” Because you put “A” at the start, I don’t think you should put in “their word” at the end. If you are doing it to avoid gender bias, you can simply insert “s/he” instead.
You can mostly detect this by yourself.
Bottom line: you can write very well. So I don’t really get why you are whining your head off with this stuff. Your situation is like that line you said. About the writer being a piano player of the heart. Your problem is that you just need to tune your keys right, and it’ll be all hunkey-dory
Keep writing!
 

 

pensive said...
on Aug. 10 2013 at 9:33 am
pensive, Fcgbhjk, Maryland
0 articles 0 photos 25 comments
Thanks! :) Glad you liked it <3 I left a comment on your article for you, btw.

on Aug. 9 2013 at 8:09 am
laurenevansok SILVER, Bromborough, Other
6 articles 0 photos 40 comments

Favorite Quote:
&#039;One person&#039;s &quot;annoying&quot; is another person&#039;s &quot;inspiring and heroic&quot;&#039; - Leslie Knope (Parks and Recreation)

Oh my gosh, wow. This is a beautiful piece of writing. It got me thinking of my definition of a writer and how I could put a writer into words. I loved it! 

pensive said...
on Aug. 5 2013 at 10:37 am
pensive, Fcgbhjk, Maryland
0 articles 0 photos 25 comments
Thanks. I'm glad you think this piece captures the reader's mind-- that's exactly what I was trying to do!

Ishara BRONZE said...
on Aug. 4 2013 at 11:49 am
Ishara BRONZE, Colombo, Other
1 article 0 photos 7 comments

Favorite Quote:
Life is more fun when colored outside the lines

Before you repeat that mantra once more, think again. True, maybe it could have been more organized, however, the picture painted in the readers mind was so vivid it captures and lures the reader in for more. Great work!

pensive said...
on Aug. 1 2013 at 12:56 pm
pensive, Fcgbhjk, Maryland
0 articles 0 photos 25 comments
I love this quote!It gave me a nice burst of inspiration. Thanks so so much for sharing :)

on Jul. 31 2013 at 4:01 pm
WriteOrWrong BRONZE, Grosse Pointe, Michigan
3 articles 0 photos 105 comments

Favorite Quote:
Sometimes you just need to take a nap and get over it. -Maura Stuard

It actually posted! I was about to try again! The reason it might not have been posting is because I was trying to gave you the link to a quote about beginners by Ira Glass. It's a great quote though, if you have a chance you should look it up. 

pensive said...
on Jul. 30 2013 at 8:33 pm
pensive, Fcgbhjk, Maryland
0 articles 0 photos 25 comments
Thanks. It means a lot to me that you would say that. I wasn't sure how relatable this piece would be, since it was pretty much a rant about my own self-doubt.  I guess the insecurity is inevitable-- if you're going to write, some of it is going to be crap, and some of it isn't.  We'll just have to keep doing it until we get a few good bits. 

on Jul. 29 2013 at 3:15 pm
WriteOrWrong BRONZE, Grosse Pointe, Michigan
3 articles 0 photos 105 comments

Favorite Quote:
Sometimes you just need to take a nap and get over it. -Maura Stuard

I swear there is going to be at least five of these comments that all get posted at the same time. There is something really, really wrong about this piece. You, my friend, are a writer if I have ever seen one. Yes, the piece could be more organized and I’m sure with a reread you will find ways to express yourself in a clearer way but you did something in this piece that only a writer could do- capture emotion. It is so relatable. I love the hesitancy, the self-doubt, the desire to quit, the cobwebs in the mind, the fear, the unattended lists of contests, the passion. I love this piece. This is what writers go through. We torment ourselves. We tell ourselves that we will never be good enough. Sure, we write something good every once in a blue moon but more often than not we are just surrounded by wads of paper that are just total crap. Keep writing though. I don’t care if it’s total crap! Keep writing.