Poseur! ... Dilettante! ... HYPOCRITE.

Do you listen to the voice in your head? Maybe not everyone has one, or the one telling you you're a has-been, a loser, undeserving of the shiny new desk in your office and bereft of original thought or the discipline to mold a readable story from thin air and some twine.

We're so bent on figuring it all out, on setting in stone our definitions of who we are. I do the same thing. Then, sometimes I remind myself I'm not finished yet. The stories I'll tell won't be completely told until I'm hot-footing it in the crematorium and everyone's gathered at the party in my honor, chatting each other up, munching on canapes and talking about how fabulous I was, et cetera et cetera. So, why try so hard to judge now?

I think we like to understand the framework. Then we build our understanding around it, place the "it" in its proper classification and move on in an orderly fashion. Yeah, it's a monkey thing. Chaos is upsetting. Unpredictable means potential for being eaten by pterodactyls when you've left your club in the cave. Knowing the score is where it's at. I get it.

I gotta say, this whole mindset does balls* for writing.

I've spent the last year spiraling the drain, trying to force creative thinking, spanking myself when nothing comes, comparing my relative failure to those talented writers around me who've worked hard and made solid strides toward their goals. I've been sliding backward and succeeding at punishing myself for it. And before that, I presented myself as someone who could tell people creativity is all around us; just pluck it from the collective unconscious like cotton candy. Tra la la. Heh. My self-fulfilling cosmic flagellation has kicked into overdrive.

Maybe I should just float along into complacency, accept I'm one of the 99% of people who dabbled a bit for a while before they found Funyuns or Hose Monsters of Newark (or whatever new trash has made the fall TV lineup.) Complacency implies a certain surface satisfaction, though. I ain't got even that.

Am I a fake? Since I've stopped telling people "I'm working on (insert current project here)," not technically. I'd give anything to be able to call myself a poseur again, though. Dilettante. I don't care. I just want to be able to write again and not feel like burying myself in the yard afterward. I'll worry about shucking the wanna-be label later.



* I got "balls" from http://moralambiguity.wordpress.com. Great word. Not used enough. Great blog, also not used enough. (Glad you're back, missy. Get to posting.)