Monday, February 05, 2007

An Imaginary Analogy That Everyone Shall Miss

I fancy that I am an okay writer. This fancy is one of the foundations of my identity, meaning that it is unstable at best---that if this fancy morphs into a will-o’-wisp, I shall be lost.

While I have a bloated writer’s ego, I know when something I turn out is awful, or worse, mediocre. It’s this feeling you get the next second after you throw that bowling bowl and be sure that it will not hit a pin even if the said pin was five feet wide. It’s the same feeling you get when you swing that dos-por-dos at a pot of candy, money and flour, and be sure that you will hurt only air. This feeling manifests after I write something: an essay, a poem, or a song. A colossal ego and its vast army of defense mechanisms are sitting ducks to, this. Whatever it is.

Sometimes I know just why I failed (isn’t it failure when you did not live up, not to what other people expect of you, but what you expect of yourself?) and since a finished piece is not a sad, un-editable past, I can correct my mistakes. Sometimes it’s a misspelling, wrong grammar, an awkward-sounding phrase or statement---something concrete. But most times the mistakes are not obvious. I know something is wrong with the finished piece, something gone awry during the whole effort of creation. Something. Not knowing what it is makes me feel discontented and unfulfilled.

The unknown nature of the error leaves me incapable of doing anything about it. Wouldn’t it be easier if ten thousand readings can convince me that the mysterious mistake is just a manifestation of my screwed imagination? But nothing is ever easy, is it. I can always ignore my discontent and frustration with how my writing turned out and go on sharing it with other people. That’s it, ignoring. When all else fails to make a bad feeling go away, just ignore it. Ignore it. You won’t be denying its existence, or trying to rationalize it to extinction. You just refuse to acknowledge it.

I think, if one dwells too much on mistakes, they take on dimensions of importance they do not really have. While nothing can be done about mysterious mistakes, something can be done about feeling inordinately bad because of them. This is how I get by as a fanciful okay writer, doing fanciful okay brain farts.

Just so nothing will break.

2 Comments:

Blogger Ferretti shoes said...

i thought nobody'd get it. tee hee.

9:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I did. I thought I told you never to be too defensive and self-conscious? Of course I did after you posted this entry.

9:07 PM  

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