The Waiting is the Worst

Good morning, friends.  I wanted to start off by thanking you, as today I crossed over my 1000th pageview on this blog, which prior to the past two months I think only my mom and cousin even knew existed and which I hadn't contributed to in about a year.  Your readership, and comments, help me to stay motivated to write and share, and as an outlet I find this both therapeutic, at times surprising, and deliciously brainpower-flexing.  As my tagline has always stated, this is a forum to exercise my (mostly) dormant writing ability, which I feel has significantly and sadly deteriorated out of disuse since my college years.

I have always loved writing.  When I was about eleven or twelve I attended the summer writing camps at George Mason University, where I had my first creative writing workshop experiences.  I was so weird, so inspired, so *artsy* in those days, I could often be found wandering the backyard with an old film camera, drawing sketches of flowers or practicing at the piano, of which I never took one professional lesson.  I daydreamed, and wrote stories and poems, and thought that when I grew up I would be a writer and illustrator of children's books.

As I grew older, I started to evolve my plan to include young adult fiction, and maybe not so much illustrating as just writing them.  I had one big project, which I worked on for years and even brought back in high school and then for a time in college, which I always thought would be "my first novel".  My mom and my best friend have seen the first chapter or two.  It was during a creative writing workshop in college that I dug it out of the old computer files, restructured and rewrote and added to parts of the story, and realized that I had close to 50 pages worth of writing, with chapter-by-chapter plans for the entire rest of the novel, and yet... I decided it was complete garbage.

Any young aspiring writer who takes a creative writing workshop in college should be forewarned - classmates make AWFUL critics.  NOBODY in a creative writing workshop (except possibly the professor) is a real professional writer or editor, and NOBODY knows what they're doing.  Everyone is terrified of sharing their work, their most personal creative endeavor, their soul, and baring it in front of their peers, and everyone fears that their own work is not good enough, that nobody will understand, that they won't like it.  And yet, they can be so seemingly cruel and unfeeling about the work of others.

My classmates did not like my story.  They didn't understand it; they thought it was outdated, or that they were missing some important aspect of the story.  One classmate had the gall to go on and on about a minor point in the story - that the main character happened to have a Walkman CD player - and used it to prove a point that the story was obviously either taking place in the past, or that the kid was poor and therefore couldn't afford an iPod.  This made me mad - partly because this detail was based on the fact that I had my own Walkman CD player (YES, they made CD players and not just portable radios!) which I was using at the time and happened to have with me in my backpack, and partly because HOW SPOILED AND NAIVE ARE YOU TO THINK THAT EVERYONE IN THE WORLD HAS AN IPOD IF THEY CAN AFFORD ONE???

Sorry, friends.  I guess this still bugs the cr@p out of me.  I did, in fact, also have an iPod.  I now have an iPhone 4 which has most of my music on it, and I do think portable CD players are a bit outdated.  But I don't think the choice of music electronics had anything pertinent to do with my story, and I resented the assumption that just because my character didn't have the latest technology, that my story was somehow old-fashioned or that the character was poor because of it.  Upper-middle-class over-privileged college kids who don't have to work to pay their own college tuition can be so narrow-minded sometimes.

I'm going off on a rant and a tangent, and for that I apologize.  Let me take a moment to rein it in back to the present and the point.  The point was that they didn't understand my story.  They thought it was childish without realizing it was intended for a younger audience, and was therefore purposely written that way not out of a lack of writing ability but for the simple reason that college students were not my intended reading audience.  They focused on silly details and failed to grasp any of the points which I held so dear, and they ripped my private story, one which I had never shared with anyone, to shreds.  My confidence as a writer was completely shot on that day, and has never fully recovered - I have not tried to write any serious work of fiction since then.  Ironic, as Creative Writing classes are supposed to spark our creativity.

So now I write mostly from real life.  I write news articles for the student paper at work, make pamphlets and fliers and marketing blurbs.  I interview students for a departmental newsletter which I create on a bi-weekly basis.  But I don't write poetry, I don't write stories.  The closest I come to creative writing pursuits is in this little blog, where I pour out the contents of my brain which don't fit into my nine-to-five (actually eight to four-thirty) lifestyle, and hope that somewhere somebody is reading and sharing and understanding me.  That somebody will leave a comment or acknowledge that it is difficult to share that which is most personal and unstructured.  That they understand, or want to understand, or have a question to ask.

Three posts without a comment and I find myself discouraged but not dissuaded.  I will keep writing, keep sharing, keep trying to recapture that sense of wonder I had as a young aspiring writer, and hope that someday that spark of imagination will come back to me.  I miss that about me.  Life as an actual REAL LIVE ADULT is kind of boring without it.  Working, grocery shopping, exercising, paying bills and stressing about them, driving and paying a fortune at the gas pump every week, I'm not old enough to be jaded about this life.  I want to play.  To wish.  To daydream.  To TRAVEL.  But, alas, traveling is expensive, and until I can figure out a way to have this full-time-with-benefits job that I really enjoy and yet which does not earn me enough for extravagances such as travel or memberships or vacations or fancy groceries, I'll have to settle for virtual play, virtual travel, virtual daydreams.

Come and daydream with me, friends.  Because life is too short to spend it being bored, eh?

I mean to write today about how we are waiting on the news from Joey's doctors, to find out whether the Chemo is working or not, to determine the outlook and course of the remaining treatments.  To muse on how the waiting and not knowing is the worst part, and how helpless and alone I feel.  To tell you all about my training for the upcoming charity 5K race, and how I've surprised myself by channeling all my stress and frustration and helplessness into beating myself bloody against that indoor track (no, not literally - there is no blood, just sore muscles and exhaustion and a few new blisters on my feet).  How I've beaten my projected goal time by ten minutes already, and feel like I could probably improve even more in the next several weeks.

But perhaps all that will have to wait for another time, as I've already probably gone beyond my allotment of time to ramble at you for the day.  If you're still with me, if you're still reading, if you care or have any thoughts about what I've shared here today, please leave a comment below so I know somebody's still listening.

Thank you for sharing this with me.  I love you all, dear friends.  Try to do something interesting and creative today, if you're of a mind, for me.  Until next time,

~swinginpoet