when i was 17, i was determined to become a writer. i had the scenery in mind, i had the language, the almighty talent, and the loud applause coming from my friends at the time. i was absolutely convinced that by the time i turn 21, i will weigh no less than Alain de Botton, or Jonathan Safran Foer, live in my own apartment in New York City, run around the city in my beige trench coat, and have the whole world written in my journal. i was sure i was unique, exceptional, and undoubtedly genius.

i turn 21 in three months. currently, i am sitting in a crowded coffeeshop in my hometown which i never left, alone, thousands of kilometers away from my dream city, i have never been properly published, and am working as a full-time journalist, in an office, converting my inner poetry into blankly written articles about the economic recession. in the beginning, it felt degrading. as if i am abusing the sacred alphabet, the letters which used to be my tool of disposing the sunlight into a thousand different sunbeams of prose, are now shamelessly stacked upon one another, where the T’s are quietly standing near the A’s, the O’s are tangled with the Y’s, and I, the murderer, am shoving them all carelessly into a box of formality, authoritatively orchestrating the assembly, whilst being in the front.

avoid being seen, don’t let them know where you’re from and what you know, or what you feel, you should hide your curvy hook behind the next letter, hide, hide, stand behind me”

my first day at the job felt like the execution day. i physically felt the pain of having to kill my most innermost relationship with letters in order to succumb into formality. the first article i’ve ever written, and published, was about eco-tourism and the dangers of climbing the mountains alone. i felt disgusted by my work, couldn’t even look at it properly, i hoped to be one of the lonely tourists in the mountains, lost, on the verge of dying, nowhere to go, nothing to do. i couldn’t believe that the first time my name ever made it to the internet was followed by an article talking about spiky rocks, and patagonia raincoats.
shortly after, i quit. having lost my previous writing abilities, i couldn’t risk losing the angst of having to go through it again. the pain was all i had. i lost the sentences, the metaphors, and successfully drowned my literary sentences inbetween the space bars. i was proud of the shame i felt, and ashamed of my newborn disability.

i couldn’t write anything.

everything i wrote fell meanly and plought into the walls i put around my words previously, it had won over my Y’s and forced my writing to take a certain shape, i assumed it’d free itself like a bird, and fly across my room beautifully the moment i remove the unwanted stencil. i was expecting a celebration, with colorful confetti razzling upon my wooden desk.

long story short, it didn’t happen. i was left with breadcrumbs slaughtered across my notebook, the beauty i was holding on to for years has resigned and shattered into dozens of pieces, i was staring at a dismembered dead body.

i grabbed the pieces of letters i had left, printed them out, put them in a plastic bag and randomly glued them on a piece of paper.

“in the morning, i had to answer endless questions with sleepy snippets of unyielding prose.”

there it is, there it was. it was still there, just not in me, perhaps it existed around me in a form of a separate living entity. i felt as if i was in a conflict with my writing, which turned into a physical being, turned around, and left, leaving the door slightly open. i was forced to apologize, and bring a bowl of fruit, as a sign of reconciliation.
i thought, perhaps, the work is whats important. my apology took form in a form of time spent working on my writing, accepting its’ flaws and imperfections, playing around with it, facing its ugliness and beauty. i would feel bereft if some benign but misguided god were to gift the work to me ready-made. its a continuing game for me. after a couple glasses of wine id run up to my writer friends asking them the exact same question,

if a hypothetical God were to approach you with a mysterious box inside which there’d be your ultimate magnum opus, would you be willing to open it? the catch would be, you dont know which form it took (consider yourself being a writer now and becoming a filmmaker later, although, you’d be working with the same pain, within the same life). and it is a painful thing, although a beautiful challenge.

i would answer this question by yelling out “of course not, the process is what matters! it is not the result, but the path curved via a pen that matters!!!” and at the time i believed it, truly, the making is what i wanted to focus on, and i would do it the only way i know, by being personal about it.
although with time, it wasnt convincing enough for me, turns out. i still catch myself wondering about the possibility of my googledoc filling itself up into the perfect essay, and following that thought i felt shame.

so you dont really like writing, after all? you just like the prize,

and as samuel beckett put it best when asked why do you write; bon qu’a ça

“it is the only thing im good at”

i still feel stuck between the feeling of being not good enough for what i do, and what i do not being good enough for me,
could it be, that it doesn’t matter at all?