Incident

A bunch of upsetting things have been happening.  I can't stop or change them.  My only current course of action is to process them.  What follows is one such attempt. It may not be very successful.

One of my co-actors in a current project is a total sweetheart, and took to writing haiku's for me last week.  I found this in turns sweet, adorable, a touch creepy and a tad frustrating.  He's lovely, very young, and definitely intelligent, but he's naive and kind in a way that makes me a little infuriated, because I can't figure out how he can stay that way, but I won't enjoy watching the world teach him any differently.  He thinks everything is wonderful.  And hey, for him it is, and I appreciate that.  I don't want to mess it up for him.  It's just that not everything is wonderful, and a life that doesn't understand that really doesn't have much depth.  So he writes these haiku, and haiku is a form that really can contain the ineffable, that can distill large thoughts into tiny drops of wisdom, and his are sweet and heartfelt and without wisdom.  Granted, he's not necessarily striving for wisdom, he's mostly just trying to make me laugh, but I feel I should be writing haiku's back, and my delight in complexity won't let me play in the shallows in that way.  It's like the piece of art on offer is a turkey made out of a hand print - it's delightful and charming, but as an older person, you don't make a turkey hand print and think it's art.

So I wrote a sonnet as a response instead.  It seemed fitting, a way of implying life offers more complexity.

The next morning, I read my sonnet to my husband.  To my husband, who teaches other people writing.  To my husband, who gets royalties for plays he's written. To my husband, who is working on an mfa in writing.

And he made a face of...he's since accused me of reading into it, and perhaps I have, but he made a face of distaste, of displeasure.  Whatever he meant by that face, it wasn't positive.

Something in me crumpled.  "OK, don't worry, I won't give it to him, I get it, it's a terrible poem," I said immediately.  There was a lot of "I didn't say that" and subsequent discussion, none of which can undo this fact:  the second I saw that face, I knew that poem was trash, and no one should ever be subjected to it. There were a lot more conversations where he said things like, well, was that just your first draft? Have you considered taking a poetry class?  How long did you work on the poem? Maybe you should have someone else read the poem, I don't know that kid.  None of these sentences made me think my poem was anything but a complete and utter waste of any one's time.  None of them changed my opinion of "the look" being one of intense dislike.

My husband has finally (if accidentally) convinced me that I am incapable of writing anything of value.  While, yes, I understand that sounds extreme, I think it's probably a valuable lesson.  There are plenty of terrible writers in the world, no need to add to the pile of dreck.  But I can't deny - it makes me sad.  Really, really sad.  It's hard to face up to being inept at something, hard to come to terms with your own inabilities.

He'd like to take that face back, because he feels guilty that he made me see my own inadequacy.  But what good does it do either of us to pretend I am good at something if I am not?  Look, if the world had been throwing praise at any of my writing and this one face was an anomaly, I could ignore it.  But any writing I do has been uniformly rejected over time.  You'd think I would have figured out by now: I am not good at stringing words together.

Wait.  Even if the world at large has been unimpressed with my writing but I believed what I wrote was still good, I would fight on, I would tell you how subjective such a thing can be.  But I look at any single piece I've written...it doesn't hold up.  I can see that.  I can see it failing to express any of what I wanted.

Ha!  Hilarious - only I could write so much about finally understanding all my "writing" was garbage. I know this page isn't frequented by very many people, so I don't count this blog.  This is words in the ether, this is the long slow howl of defeat.  I'll continue to write things here, in an attempt to understand them.  But I won't bother you with any fiction or poetry unless someone else wrote it.  I won't bother my husband with it.  I won't go to open mic nights or submit anything to journals or otherwise pollute the world.

And as sad as that makes me, in sum total, isn't that a win?