PLEASE SELECT A VOLUME
this was a ramble I initially intended only for myself; but in the spirit of openness, here it is. it's not the most coherent: it's painfully raw, but I hope you can relate.
I fear that I cannot be a writer. I fear that what I have to say is not worth hearing; that I am not smart enough for my work to merit approval or interest. I must acknowledge that within myself there is a desire to be great, for my work to be adored and admired. It is cordial with my other desire, a simpler pleasure of making something from words, making characters and stories and songs from sentences on a page. That joy was sparked in me as a child, and it persists.
The desire for admiration comes from my own admiration for the authors who sparked that joy in me. I want, in my heart, to spark that joy for others. Yet I fear that I am insufficient to do so. I fear that my words will be relegated to the heap bin, that I will never be known for it, that it will be read neutrally and forgotten.
Why does this element of fame harbour itself in my heart? Is it born from the solitude I have existed in since my birth, a solitude both chosen and reinforced? I have never been one for people. I like them, I cherish them, I love them, but it is a concentrated effort for me to be around them. I desire the ease with which friends make friends, lovers make lovers. Often it feels like a fascinating world which I can only admire, and writing stories is merely the means by which I can feel like I too can participate. There is nothing inhibiting me on the surface; I do have friends and romances, but only a few, and they are always unusual. There is a difference with me. It is something deep and nameless and terribly fundamental. I do not think I could be rid of it without being rid of myself, and no matter how much I desire to be more social, more open, more human, I cannot pay that price.
Back to writing; ever since I was a child (since that spark was lit) I have desired to make stories. Even then I knew solitude well, and leaned into it willingly. I remember I wanted to be a famous author; see, this dynamic has existed for near all my life. Did I sense, even then, the difference in my nature that separated me from my friends and family? Did I believe, even then, that creating worlds away was my escape, and that becoming famous from fantasies would be the cure for that pain?
I know that is a road without an end. Fame does not sate the pains of childhood, nor adulthood. But god, do I still want it. I hate that I want it, but I do. I try to starve that desire, and feed the joy that was catalyst to this all. That joy is purer, and focused on other people more than my own ego. I try not to warp it with my delusions. But I'll never fully be rid of it. The wound is too deep. That's alright. All there is to do is to do what we can.
The fear of being different also manifests itself in me through a fear of inadequacy. In my early teenage years I sought escape from pain. It was covid; I was isolated, had no truly close friends, and suffered recurrent panic attacks and anxiety. It was the darkest time in my life, those years. I turned to fiction, as I had always done to relieve pain. Yet now I look upon that time and I cannot help but scorn myself. This fiction was baseless, shallow, just sniveling escape. I know that's unfair, and I have sympathy for myself as well (I was only 13 at the time), but I still fear that's all I'll ever be capable of creating. Beneath my conscious knowledge of plot, character, themes... is my storytelling actually compelled by nothing more than a desire to hide in the dark? Is that why I write?
My first panic attack occurred at near-complete random, one night. The next few nights, it returned. I had never felt such agony in my heart; I'd been relatively sheltered from suffering throughout my life, but this was a force that nothing in the world could protect me from. Sunset brought me dread. Every day was filled with bleak anticipation; nights were either monstrous or fearful. So it went for two years. There may have been underlying reasons. I was returning from summer break to a school I hated, but at the time it felt utterly unexplained. Suddenly I was suffering as I never had before, and there was no reason at all for it.
I think I'm still working through that experience. In my first year at college, I regained an interest in writing that had floundered since the lockdown. Though I would not have described myself as a nihilist in any way, when I look back now on my writing it is bleak and dark. There is suffering and horror. In a piece I submitted for a fiction class, two lover soldiers sit in a besieged castle. Food runs out; a secret cabal of cannibals take their friends; there is a brutal mutiny. The lovers end the story by fleeing the anarchy, throwing society and hierarchy to the wind, and running into the woods. It is a dark, dark setting, and the kernel of love at its center was a conscious choice of protest against the stronger currents of subconscious despair that permeated my art. In almost all stories I wrote in that time, the endings were bad. Protagonists died, or sacrificed themselves, or lived on without meaningful change. I was silently compelled by Grim Realism; I pooh-poohed at those silly hero's journeys and moral parables that didn't reflect what I had experienced. The world was cruel and unstructured. Suffering could strike at any moment, for no reason at all. My stories, as I slowly processed the darkness of the covid years, sought unconsciously to reflect that with meandering plots which strummed continuously on a one-note tune of nihilism over which thin facades of hope and purpose could be painted. I never consciously enjoyed grim-dark themes of that nature. I always infused into my stories a core of hope, but that was a cerebral action. My subconscious didn't really believe it, I think.
Now I want to explore the next phase of my life. Wrapping up my second semester of university, I had a health scare. Blood in my stool. My mind gripped it and became convinced I had colon cancer. It took over two months to see a gastroenterologist, who ordered tests and found nothing concerning. But that period of uncertainty was a time of darkness for me. The same anxiety which had ruled me during covid rose again under a different mantle. The semester had not gone well; I was especially lonely, far away from my hometown friends and family, and now I became convinced that I was going to die. I became actually depressed. Leaving my bed for class was a monumental effort each morning, and since my classes all ended at midday, I had the rest of the day to stew in fear. I had energy for nothing but the bare minimum to pass classes. Midday to midnight I usually spent in my dorm room. I disassociated, wandered out of town into the countryside often, trying to be logical and sensible, but it was useless. It may have been exacerbated by seasonal depression, which I'd never before experienced before moving to this university in the colorless flatlands of Ohio in winter. Everything compounded into a time of misery, anxiety, and depression. I spoke to no one in my classes. I was a ghost. I grappled with the fear of death, which was really the fear of being a failure, which was really the fear of being outsider, the same demon I have always struggled with.
All these times in my life were hard. They taught me bad lessons, lessons I am still unlearning, about how the world works. I've only recently tried to see these times as derivatives of the greatest fear of my life; being unchangably, undesirably different. It makes a great deal of sense. I have always identified with outsiders, with the inhumans and the ascetic. I love the natural world, I love silence, landscapes, animals and dragons, machines and fantastic places, in part because they are apart from human society. But in the end, I love people too, and I wish I was better at being one.
You learn to deal. Over several months I became used to my health anxieties, then rose above them. I took the reins and learned to defy them until they no longer held sway over me. I'll never be fully rid of that fear. That's all right. All there is to do is to do what we can.
All of us, I think, (I hope) harbour fears as I do. Maybe not the same ones, but we all have to learn to tolerate the pain of their presence, and maybe even turn them into something productive. For me, I believe my next task is to transition my source of motivation from these fears to that simple joy of making something that sparks joy in others. It's older than my fears and desires; I truly do believe it's stronger, too, though often it doesn't feel that way.
I may not be the most knowledgeable about people, but I do know how complicated we are. We are never rid of the wounds of childhood; they will bleed until we are buried. Do not let them fester and rot. Do not let the pain, nor fear of pain, drive you forward: it will take you down dark roads. Carry them, tend to them, feel them, know them intimately. They are a fundamental part of us, but there are other parts too. We are all many wellsprings.
For myself, I think my fear has too often imposed itself as the truth. No matter how hard I try, I have always felt an outsider. As a child I saw no use in fighting that notion; it reinforced itself daily. I accepted it, somewhat, and turned myself to the joy of storytelling in its stead. In my teenage years, calamity struck in my mind and I sought that joy desperately, but it did not work. I was forced to confront who I really was. In my first year of university, the ugly fruit of that confrontation ripened, and I realised that I feared who I was. I hated it. The fear of death took hold and my own mortality gripped me. I had spent years hiding in fiction. It was delusion. If I can be honest, I fear how far that delusion still affects me.
All this to say, I am terrified of the notion that all my aspirations of being a storyteller stem from a desire to hide from reality. I am terrified of the possibility that all I am, in the end, is afraid. The possibility that for all my talk of learning to live alongside and control my fear, in the end, it is all there is, and my effort was only a painful charade. It sounds like an ending to a story I would have written in my months at university.
This outlook is bleak. I hate it. I refuse it. I categorically refuse it! I refuse to believe this is all that I am. I refuse to drink only from the wellspring of pain. You get used to the taste after a while, but there are sweeter ones, and their sweetness does not make them any less true. I am not special for my suffering: we all have it. I used to think I was, maybe -- that other people might have pain, but at least they were human for it. I felt nonhuman, and therefore I felt pain ill befit me. So I hid from it. That's not how it fucking works, man. Is the fact I feel the same pain as anyone else not proof that I am like anyone else? I am human! I am like you! We all suffer, we all love, we all hurt! Our dripping blood binds us together as does a warm kiss.
Time and again fear blinded me and hid the road ahead. This is all there is. This is all you will be. I knew for truth I would be wracked with panic attacks the rest of my life. I have less than one a year now. I knew for truth I would be dead from cancer within a month. It was nothing at all. Nothing at all! I live!
Those fears I have silenced. There will be more to come, I'm sure, for their progenitor is never idle. That eldest fear of being alone will always be there. It will always tell me who it thinks I am: a strange, inept, just-kind-of-there outsider who deluded himself that he could be someone else, someone more, until he died.
Except it is not delusion. I am more already! Every prediction made by fear has been false. It is the true delusion. All I have to do is open my eyes, and feel the world around me, and set off on a path that I choose. There is so much more than this.
I will never be fully rid of my insecurities and anxieties. That's alright. All there is to do is to do what you can. And we are all of us capable of more than we believe.
-- Snowflower