for a girl so inclinced towards labelling everything in my life, i am entirely too unsure about who i am. i don’t have many talents or hobbies — i’ve tried just about everything, played the piano, went horseback-riding, did ballet, badminton, played the trombone, tried out modern dancing, played tennis. thing is, i’m a perfectionistic quitter and my father, along with his oddly shaped eyebrows and rage-filled soul, has inherited me a paralyzing fear of failure and, going perfectly with that, a deeply rooted pessimistic attitude. the older i get, the less i try and the less i try, the less i fail.
writing is the only thing that i have stuck with; i quickly learned how to read, i was a curious child, gifted in the way i understood words, hungry for them and their meanings. somewhere in my childhood home you will be able to find wrinkled papers with the misspelled musings of a six year-old, coming up with stories as soon as my little hand knew what to do with a blunt pencil.
until recently (yesterday, if i’m being honest), i have believed writing was something that came naturally to me, that it was the one thing i was good at. i have written thousands of words, hundreds of pages — my mind is like an unending fountain of ideas, good and bad, fully developed and barely there plots that spew out of my mouth late at night, rambling to myself, immersing myself in my own realities until i get bored of them and i come up with something new.
i am an incredibly fast thinker — this is not a brag, though i wish it was. from the outside, it may look like an inability to commit, when in reality, i have finished writing novels, i have come up with sequels, prequels, spin-offs, all within a moment’s time. unmedicated adhd has turned me into a powerhouse of creativity on the inside, while my body’s lying still, scrolling mindlessly through social media as a way to distract myself by how much i know i would fail at sitting down and actually capturing all of my thoughts. even writing this, i am thinking of twenty other things at once and it’s so exhausting, having to actively force myself to return to the now every second of every day. i am tired of being stuck in the past and the present simultaneously, living through every possibility of every impossibility, and still having to exist and function.
my wordings are lacking, this i can tell. is it because english isn’t my first language? is it because the wirring of my laptop distracts me from coming up with clever formulations? or is it perhaps simply due to the fact that, despite my previous rock-solid belief that somewhere within this mess of neurodivergency and a general chaoticness, there is a good writer, i am not actually all that talented?
if i cannot write, who am i? i have defined myself with a lot of things, ranging from various, ever-changing hyperfixations, to my mental disorders, to the current book i liked. nothing lasts, this i have come to accept. i’ve gotten used to fearing a decline of interest in something i devote my entire being to for a week, it’s a dread i have learned to live with. but what does it mean for me, when the one thing that has been by my side for as long as i can remember, is just kind of… eh?
wattpad and the sad girl media i consume don’t help the fact that something is missing in the way i write, like i’m trying to be someone i’m not. i catch myself inhaling my sentences again and again, trying to find the correct adverb to insert to make myself sound a little more cynical, a little more unreliable.
shouldn’t i strive for reliability? why have ramona flowers and clementine kruczynski made me feel like i needed to be less understood, when i know from personal experience that someone else viewing you as a manic pixie dream girl makes the sadness not any less palpable? why am i trying to turn myself into less of a human by trying to appear more human? something about romanticizing the good days feels seriously depraved to me.
why are the bonds i yearn for so inherently toxic? it can’t solely be the relationship i have with my father that is to blame for that. i thought i was more self-aware about how lana del rey and lolita (1997) have affected me, i was sure i knew why i behave the way i do, but when i look back at these last couple months, the things that have been wandering through my head, the middle-aged men i have watched horrible movies for, the way i dedicate myself to them even in my dreams, none of that seems plausible to me.
before i delve deeper into an analysis of the origins of my kat stratford syndrome, i want to return to the topic at hand: how particularly unspecial i am. people’s first impressions of me always used to make me laugh, but looking back, they make my knees buckle. i know my blackness is the reason i seem to come across more confident than i am — i have yet to find another explanation for it.
i had a roommate when i was staying in psych ward a couple months ago; i am not sure this is the best example i can give, as it was the ward mainly for people affected by borderline personality disorder (shocker! i know!) and putting 30 ticking time bombs into a confined space usually doesn’t end well, but in my two weeks with this girl, i realized something: people think i’m normal.
on her first day in my room, we talked a bit because she seemed nice, had a bleached buzzcut and was as much of an oversharer as i am. she told me about her cats, about how much she wanted to kill herself, about how she grew up poor and the sound of knuckle-cracking triggered her tourettes and how insecure she felt about it. on the second day, she drew a portrait of me and gave me note with her number on, below it scribbled in a very cute handwriting: you seem rly cool :)
and i do, don’t i? i’m so anxious around new people and she barely let me get a word in anyway, but i seemed cool to her, a self-proclaimed punk with stick n pokes and weltschmerz-induced panic attacks. so what is it, if not my exoticness?
my therapist does this thing where i tell her about someone being mean to me and she immediately concludes they must be jealous of me. i’m young, i’m pretty, i’m nice, i’m interesting, she says. of course, why wouldn’t everyone be intimidated by me, my nonchalance, my rugged good looks, the self-assurance oozing from every crevice on my perfectly sculpted body.
my god, i look and dress like adam sandler’s and rue bennett’s lovechild. be fucking serious.
i can’t stand the dishonesty of the people around me and i think it’s part of the reason i like to start fights so much. listen, i know i wouldn’t be able to handle the truth — if everyone just started agreeing with me, realizing the only thing making me interesting is my difference in phenotype.
maybe that’s why i revel in being a little quirky. maybe i don’t want people to find out how truly average i am.
back to my dilemma: i write like i think but i think like i’m distracted, constantly worrying by what’s to come on the next page, while mentally skimming through the last few chapters, while closing the book to marvel at the cover. i appreciate my ability to fully indulge myself, to let the current consume me, but i feel that i should be better at it, shouldn’t i? i reread my words and frown and think, is this the best i could do? why do i feel like i have to look up synonyms and antonyms and search for what something is called in my native language because i have forgotten, because the words fly around my head but i just cannot reach them anymore, so i translate and itch and pine until i find the word that fits into my expectation of what my text should be? i don’t want to write long, embellished thinkpieces on casual instagram or the whiteness of cottagecore, and i don’t have to, no one is asking me to, but here i am, scrolling through blog posts of Sad Girls Everywhere, asking myself whether or not i am intelligent enough to participate in what used to be art — am i the one having turned this into a competition by posting my brain matter for the world to see only to be hurt when the world doesn’t care? isn’t that what i wanted? to blend in, to disappear in the noise?
how can writing be ‘my thing’ when i’m so… not perfect at it? am i doing it for me, because i enjoy it? why do i base my self-worth on the idea of other people reading my stuff and pursing their lips at my use of perhaps instead of maybe, as if they’d even bat an eyelid. god, i’m so pathetic.
i don’t do new years resolutions because i generally spent new years absolutely fucking miserable but maybe this can be an exception: less caring about what other people do and say and own and more doing what i want. who actually cares about mediocrity? who actually gives a shit? shouldn’t i like what i create, no matter what? and if i don’t, shouldn’t that be okay?
so: less caring. more trying. more failing. i’ll be okay, right? i think i will.