Writing

I'm rarely able to write without watching myself as if from a great distance, laughing at my pretension and thinking something along the lines of "oh, now she's crumpling the paper and throwing it at the ground. How original." Almost all of my journal entries start with "I know this is clichéd, but ..." and every poem I've ever written contains an apology for how corny (or sappy or cheesy or trite) it is. I've read so many compilations of terrible, cringe-worthy teen poetry and stories that I'm unable to write my own terrible, cringe-worthy poetry and stories. I'm overwhelmed by stage fright. Sometimes it seems like a better option to just wait until I'm in my twenties to start writing, because surely by then I'll be able to write perfectly, skipping over this troublesome teenage phase of unoriginality.

Even that isn't a fail-safe option, though. In Exploring Diabetes With Owls, David Sedaris describes the journals he kept in his twenties, saying: 
It's poetry written by someone who's never read any poetry but seems to think its key is
     lowercase letters
    and lots of
        empty
                  spaces.

That's basically my worst fear: not difficulty writing the poetry itself, necessarily, but finding it later and tearing it apart. I want to protect this little bit of myself - from myself. I imagine 30-year-old Maya coming upon her teenage notes, so important at the time, and laughing scornfully before throwing them away. Even worse, though, would be to find them and keep them, exclaiming over how cute and sweet and silly they are and shoving them in a scrapbook with some baby photos.

I'm fine writing about things I know (five paragraph essays, debate cases, and anything where I can quote other people), but things I have experienced or feel strongly about? Forget it. (I realize I cheated a little here because this post is something I have opinions about, but I also quoted David Sedaris. Oh well, rules are made to be broken.) (See? That's a cliché! I can't even help myself).

I guess I'm writing about writer's block, but somehow that description doesn't really seem to fit. I have ideas of things to write about, and I feel like I could write them, if I let myself. But I'm scared of caring too much, of writing passionately about opinions that will change with time. Scared of not being able to get my point across, and even more so, getting my point across and then my point seeming stupid in five years.

But the thing is - it probably will seem stupid in five years. People change (Simone wrote an awesome post about that here) and that's a good thing. It's still better to have something I don't believe anymore than to have nothing at all. Besides, maybe I need to write a hundred pages of bad poetry before I can write a single good sentence. There's only one way to find out.  

~Maya