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kinosternon · 7 years

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(CW: abstract discussions of abuse, several heaping spoonfuls of new-adult angst. Also, length—this is like 2,000 words lol)

This particular story, such as it is, starts with me chatting with a very close friend of mine over Skype, and looking through my email at the same time. (Me and this friend are the type of close where we Skype once a week and they play video games or code while I browse the Internet and watch whatever they’re up to, so a certain amount of multitasking is par for the course.) I’m a big fan of StoryBundle and related stuff, so when I came across their Write Stuff 2017 bundle (https://storybundle.com/writing), I remember that I’d bought a similar bundle of theirs last year, and went to check it out.

It actually wasn’t the first time I’d looked it over. I’ve been trying to give up writing for the past several months, and been through a similar cycle several times: get fed up with the pressure of writing, decide to give up on writing altogether, feel a lot better, start thinking about writing again—without so much as opening a document or a notebook. Reading the descriptions for the bundle got me thinking about the whole pattern, and I said out loud to my friend, “Reading about writing feels like looking through an ex’s Facebook.”

Then I stopped and thought about what I’d said, because it did. That was exactly what it felt like. So I started to wonder why.

As a white, male, able-bodied 20-something in the United States who attended a liberal arts college and tries to be at least politically aware, if not politically active, I find the narrative of abuse survival to be one that’s ineffectual to apply to myself. Have I been in some shitty situations with people?

…Yeah. I have.

Have I caused some shitty situations? Without a shadow of a doubt, though I’m pretty hopeful about the idea that I’ve never been outright abusive. Certainly I’ve never been so intentionally, but intention can only get a person so far.

I struggled for a long time with the idea that I may have experienced abusive situations in my childhood and beyond, and now I’m more or less at peace with the idea that abuse is a narrative that I don’t feel comfortable applying to my life experiences so far. I heard a lot about abuse growing up—which is good, it’s absolutely vital to spread that knowledge—but not a lot about what to do and how to go forward when a relationship is just shit, and that left me stuck for a while. It really wasn’t fun.

Still, eventually, I figured out an answer to the latter question I’m comfortable with. I don’t need to be able to prove, to myself or anyone else, that a relationship is abusive for me to want to leave it. I think more people out there need to remember that, especially because the myth of needing proof is often used by abusers themselves.

To believe and be properly sympathetic to people who had undergone abuse, I had to understand that their concerns were not my concerns—that I am not, in my head, part of the “survivors of abuse” identity group. Anything else was harmful to me, and both disrespectful and detrimental to the people I might encounter during my attempts to be a good ally.

Abuse, at the moment, isn’t a helpful way for me to frame my relationships. Negativity and toxicity, on the other hand, absolutely are. I started feeling a lot less anxious when I started applying more shades of subtlety to my emotions and experiences.

Time and circumstance can change relationship dynamics a lot. Lately, I’ve reconnected with a friend whom I’d labeled “toxic” pretty vibrantly in my head, and whom I’ve got a complicated history with. I turned the idea over in my head for months, dismissing it as a bad idea with more and more reluctance each time. In the end, fairly sure of the reasonableness of the idea, I followed through on the impulse to contact them online. Turns out the friend was not only still happy to hear from me, they were in a much better place than they’d been back when I cut off contact. And I’m in a better place now, too. They don’t test my boundaries anymore, and even if they did, I’d feel much more sure about enforcing them.

Having this friend back in my life has been enjoyable and enriching. Another source of support in life is always welcome.

I’ve made some new friends, too, and both reconnecting with sour friendships and making new ones that I’m okay with require a certain amount of emotional resilience. I’ve been trying to cultivate a strong sense of self-worth, agency, and self-reliability independent of those friendships, and it’s been helping.

I’m not quite sure what to call the more welcoming side of those efforts, though. Tolerance, forgiveness, and patience all have different undertones. I think it’s somewhere between the three, and I’m still testing out the way those nuances shift depending on the specific circumstance. And they all start with an awareness of my own limits, and the feeling that I’m always allowed to stop and walk away.

Anyway, this was a story about writing. Setting boundaries for yourself is important, I thought, as I considered where the thought of “writing as shitty ex” had come from. If I kept shying away from writing all this time, then maybe it really was a toxic relationship.

The problem is, writing isn’t a person. I don’t ascribe very hard to any one particular class of thought or pedagogy when it comes to writing, either, so as far as I can tell that isn’t the difficulty. It’s still possible that outside influences are building up and forming an unpleasant imagined persona, like an unwelcoming audience. But for a little while now, I’ve been trying to curtail instances of random exposure to the displeasure of strangers, and by now that influence has noticeably lessened. So what was going on?

When I thought about it in those terms, it wasn’t too hard to reach a perplexing conclusion: I’m in a bad relationship with writing, and I’m the only person in that relationship.

I’m all the moving parts. Just me. Which led me to wonder, what am I doing to myself that I haven’t consciously realized?

I recently started tutoring a couple of kids in creative writing through Skype call. (Someone thought it was a good idea to put an advertisement on a freelancing website, instead of a tutoring-specific one, but that’s another story, and one that I know very little about.) The first couple of lessons were a little bit awkward, until one of the parents clued me in to the idea of working through prompts in class, instead of assigning things and providing feedback. Then a couple of online resources mentioned the idea of working along with the kids on exercises, so I tried that, too.

I would’ve figured it was a bad idea, putting them on the spot or accidentally showing off, but so far both strategies seem to be working. It’s been good to show that even a teacher can’t think of everything on a tight schedule, that what I come up with is imperfect or incomplete. And better still, I’ve gotten into the habit of waiting a little longer for answers, continuing to ask prompt past the first, dubious or hesitant response. I’ve been asking a lot of “Why?”, and making games out of brainstorming. It’s been fun, and I’d like to think I’m not the only one learning.

I think I’ve forgotten how important patience is in writing, as in many other things.

One summer, between semesters of college, I tried living with friends. It was a lot of fun, but there were parts that were very stressful—specifically, the coming-up-with-rent part. I managed to land a decent ghostwriting job, but it wasn’t enough to keep up with bills, not by a long shot. (I was extremely privileged to have parents that were willing to come up with some of the difference, without which I would have been very ill-advised even to try.) So I tried to balance an internship or two alongside it, which ultimately led to me keeping abreast of chores and stressing instead of working on everything else.

Near the end of the summer, desperately trying to make up a huge word deficit on a ghostwriting project, I set myself a goal: 24,000 words in 24 hours. A quota of 1,000 words an hour, with permission to do whatever I wanted each hour, after hitting that point.

I managed it, almost getting to the end of the piece. I don’t think I so much as opened the document for eight weeks afterward. I blew far past the intended deadline, and in the meantime, my client moved on to greener writing pastures. I was never paid for that project.

I didn’t realize until years later that ever since then, something related to the writing part of me has felt injured—that it feels like something got sprained inside.

People talk about their inner editors. Whatever that particular force in my head is, I’m not sure it counts as just an editor anymore.

My editorial sense is just fine when it comes to other people. I like providing developmental edits. I’m good at line-editing and formatting. I’ve interned at a literary agency, and, as mentioned above, worked as a ghostwriter before that. I occasionally beta-read fanfic and/or critique friends’ work for fun. I like fixing other people’s writing, and I like meeting them where they are in their efforts to improve their technique.

Moreover, I’m pretty confident of my technical writing ability. I know how to put together a sentence. I’m as susceptible to typos as the next person, but otherwise my error rate is pretty low. I’ve got a working sense of structure, pacing, and style. I actually know how to format dialogue correctly, how to use a long dash and a semicolon, and the difference between a too-long sentence and a run-on.

That doesn’t mean I don’t still have a long way to go—that’s the nature of writing. (See: I write long sentences even when I shouldn’t, and I’m far too fond of italics.) But I’m not all that self-conscious about any of that, really. It doesn’t bug me.

No, I’m just completely certain of my inability to have ideas. Or, having miraculously had an idea that I didn’t immediately tear to pieces, to actually sit down and start. Or, having started, to muddle through the middle, let alone finish. Or, having somehow finished, to have the self-discipline to do any revision whatsoever.

I “know” these things just won’t ever happen—that I “can,” but that I won’t. And I “know” that I shouldn’t give up on one of my most-developed skills. But when I finally gave myself permission to give up—to move on to something I haven’t built up to be so utterly wraught—I felt a lot better. And thus the cycle began.

Even getting to that point—feeling like I deserved a chance to walk away—was in itself a kind of growth. But I think I’m ready to try moving beyond it. I’m just not sure what direction “beyond” will be in.

I’m slowly circling around a choice. Like water spiraling around a drain, or one of those pennies in a black-hole model at the mall. (Anyone else remember those?) I could try to break free—I’m fairly certain that I can, to whatever degree I want, though there would be parts of it that would hurt. But I don’t think I want to.

I’m not going to let writer-me take over my life again anytime soon. I don’t want to give him any power, because or the past few years he’s done the opposite of earn it. But I might be willing to get back together with him, for a bit of a trial run. The equivalent of a re-friending on Facebook and maybe catching up over coffee.

I find myself curious as to how it might go.

#abuse cw #physical injury cw #(mild metaphorical mention)#rambling about writing #but I guess it counts as #my nonfiction

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