Renewed Ramblings from a Borderline Freak

Let's just dive right in.

When you write - whether it's a short story, a poem, a blog post, or an article, you're reaching inside yourself and showing a part of yourself to the world ... and that reflection that we stare in, when we edit or re-read or criticize, shows us ourselves. That's why we like to write, I think. I know that other people have venues that they use to creatively show themselves to the world. Actors act. Painters paint. Musicians play. Singers sing. I'm a writer - not a very dedicated one, true, but I am a writer - and I used to write.

When I write, I see myself. I reveal aspects of myself to the reader. My mood, my voice, my thoughts, my opinions about the world and life and other people and the state of modern morality - out it comes. It's like lancing a wound, popping a zit, removing a splinter, having a good dump. Something disgusting comes out and it's a relief. "Aaaah," the writer says; "that felt so good!" Then we make the mistake of turning around and looking in the toilet, or examining the pus and blood or splinter. That's when we make a face and wish we didn't have to do this.

 "Oh my god," we groan. "THAT was inside ME??"

Don't get me wrong. Not every little repulsive thing about a writer comes out in every little thing the writer writes. Wouldn't that be awkward, to show that kind of crap in a note to your kid's school teacher? Or a report at work? Or a performance review? A half-decent writer knows enough to not poke the needle down too far, squeeze too hard, push and grunt too enthusiastically. You can't go about expressing your deepest and most secret thoughts about rape or racism or meal worms all the time. You make other people uncomfortable, make them not want to be around you, make them dislike you for not being like them, for deviating, for practicing emotional and intellectual strip-teases for an unappreciative public.

I have an incredible respect for writers who throw their work out in public for open criticism and study. TV writers (Dan Harmon comes to mind), opinionated comic strip artists (like Bill Watterson), stand-up comics (Greg Proops), avant-garde novelists (Cormac McCarthy) pop their zits, dig out their splinters, take their intellectual and creative dumps in public, and let's face it, everyone's a critic. Quite honestly, I'm not sure which kind of critic can hurt the most - the intellectual, worldly, practiced dilettante with pronounced opinions, or the knuckle-dragging, Honey Boo Boo-watching Luddite who blindly follows one political party and has never had an original thought in his or her life. The Harmons and the Proopses and the McCarthys keep squeezing and digging and pushing out art, alternately blowing kisses to the world or giving it the finger, while the Wattersons decide Enough Is Enough and bow out, igniting their catharses in private.

And what happens to those artists - writers, painters, actors, whatever - that don't squeeze and lance and push and evacuate? Well, we fill up with infected puss and feces. We become toxic waste dumps of frustrated emotion. It spins and snowballs and burgeons and swells, until our battered souls can't keep from cracking. It leaks out - people wonder what's wrong. It manifests as such strange and dark things. Binge-drinking. Cutting. Hearing voices. Anti-socialism. Nail biting. Recurring nightmares. Depression. Anorgasmia. And the more packed with garbage we get, the more parts of us splinter off and ooze psychoses, the less we want to tackle the build-up. Lancing ourselves would produce a tsunami of malodorous, greasy, bile-laced offal, and we would not just be exposing that shameful detritus to the world .... we would have to face it too. We'd have to turn around and look at the mess we made, the stinking, disgusting offspring of our souls. We would have to face up to the fact that, not only was this crap inside of us in the first place, we allowed it to swell and grow and metastasize until our souls become unrecognizable.

 The images we make of ourselves for others to admire are just that: Images. They're put up to hide the crap in us. The more crap we collect, though, the image becomes more and more fragile. The illusion becomes harder to maintain. We spin out of control and at times feel we're falling; we have to hide in stairwells or bathroom stalls until the panic subsides. We lose the lifeline that keeps soul moored to body. We spend more and more time away from ourselves, and away from people who make us be ourselves. We keep promising ourselves that we'll pull ourselves together, start writing again, balance our check books, do our personal filing, confront our spouses with our issues, but we keep putting it off because it will just reinforce to us how broken and chaotic we've become. We would rather drink a six-pack in our pajamas alone at home and watch videos on YouTube. It's easier than admitting failure to ourselves, our families, our coworkers, our friends.

 How do writers break this cycle? I don't know. I guess I'll just have to keep writing to find out. And when I go back and re-read this, I will be looking at the bloody splinter, the pus, the feces I've just pushed out. Disgusting ... but it is what I am.