I guess I’m no writer. I doubt myself all the time. After all, I’m not a lesbian, and I don’t smoke cigarettes. I didn’t drop out of school and I don’t have a drinking problem. I don’t have tattoos (although I think of getting one here and there) or multiple piercings. I’ve never tried drugs. I don’t hate my parents (granted, I have a complicated history with my father), and they are still together. For the most part, I had a good childhood. I don’t think everything we read in lit class is “amazing” or “beautiful” or even literature.
These circumstances and conditions just don’t make for someone that everyone wants to listen to. They don’t create the “jaded but beautiful voice” to which everyone is drawn.
By no means have I had it easy, mind you. It just has always seemed to me that you need to be damaged to be interesting or to be able to write. I have been damaged, but I have not been overcome; I’m better for it. That, I suppose, is not enough to give me that “character,” the necessary element to do what I so badly wish to do.
I do get depressed– that’s got to be something to write about, right?
We were talking about that, me and the tall thin girl, over glasses of the house red wine. Her earrings were big hoops that dangled against the fair skin on her jawline. Sometimes it would be great to be ignorant and stupid. You wouldn’t have these unanswered questions or feel that life was hard or wonder what the hell you were doing.
