Average

People say that practice makes perfect. More and more I view this blog as just that-- a writing exercise I can undertake whenever I want with whatever parameters I think would suit it. Because writing is something that takes practice. I realize that more and more as my life slips past me and I stare down the terrifying prospect that is being a thirty year old man.

I realize that, on the whole, being a thirty year old man is not actually a terrifying thing. There are many worse things I could be than a thirty year old man. I could have cancer, I could be a black man in the early eighteenth century, I could be dead.

But it's still quite scary being on the 20 side of 30 and not being where you imagined yourself when you were on the teen side of 20. Not that I ever gave it that much thought, if we're being honest. I really never thought about my future in any real concrete terms when I was a kid. Even when I was in high school I wasn't concerned with the idea of my future. No one ever really talked to me about going to college in anything but the most basic and abstract terms, like, "Oh I guess maybe your dad put away a bit of money for you to go to school with or really anything at all." No one ever said that I needed to go to college, even that I should, until my senior year of highschool when I was basically told I had screwed up so badly with scheduling classes the last two years that I'd be repeating another year of highschool and I responded by dropping out.

My mom took me to see a therapist and he said I should go to college.

The guy also had a light that he claimed could "heal" you with certain frequencies of light strobes and listened to whale-song while I was in his office. Take that how you want it.

So I thought, yeah, sure, I'll go to college! I was eighteen at the time.

I didn't go to college until I was twenty-two.

I still haven't graduated as I approach my twenty-seventh birthday.

You may be starting to notice a pattern, huh? Like perhaps I have trouble finishing things?

Let me tell you something--that is like the absolute shittiest thing to have when you want to be a person who writes things for other people to read.

Writing takes a lot of self control. Especially if you're not writing for a company or for a book deal or something. When you're just writing something you want to write and hope that people will like it or be willing to print it or even (in my wildest dreams) give you money for it but none of that has come to pass it takes a serious commitment and self confidence to force yourself to not only slap the idea down on the page, but then to edit it, to fix the errors and logical problems and slice out the bad parts and try to come up with the good parts. You're doing all that in your spare time with no promise of reward or recognition and-- at least in my case--with this annoying little voice in the back of your head reminding you how crap everything you're writing is, how there are people out there writing better things more quickly than you and you can never ever live up to even half of what they're putting out with apparent ease.

It's hard for me to form an objective opinion on my own writing for obvious reasons. I think it's good, okay maybe. I don't know how good, though. I really have no idea if it's even remotely interesting for people to read any stories (or blogs) that I write. People like my girlfriend tell me they enjoy my stories, but I can't help but hear that same voice telling me they're just saying that so as to not hurt my feelings, or they mean it but can't look at the writing objectively because they're close to me.

I'm sounding like a whiny kid, though, and I'm going to take a step back.

Okay, better.

The point I was trying to make before I was side-tracked by my own self-doubt is that writing on your own is very hard--even for a person with serious drive and self-motivation and I am the least self-motivated person that I know in the entire world. I'm so lazy that sometimes even when I know I'm supposed to write something that actually matters (like a midterm paper or something) I'll sit and watch the deadline sail by me, waving as it goes.

My laziness and ability to procrastinate shocks even me sometimes. I've gotten so bad about it that I have over two-hundred hours logged playing Team Fortress 2. Now, I like TF2, it's a good game, but probably not 200+ hours good. Why do I spend so much time in it? Because it's easy for me to start it, join a sever, and play for however long I want. I've evolved so far into procrastination that   I even procrastinate my procrastination activities. I'm not willing to summon up the wherewithal to start playing a single player or story driven game where I'll actually have to commit to the game so I just play TF2. I've caught myself thinking about other games to play while playing TF2 but procrastinating switching to those games--a process that would take maybe thirty seconds and involve nothing more than slight movements of one of my fingers and my wrist.

All of this is happening as I procrastinate doing something more important like cleaning, or homework, or writing.

Writing is important to me. Not this blog thing, as I said, this is just practice. Something to keep my writing muscles from atrophying totally away. The real writing I do (occasionally) matters very much to me. It's just scary to do it. There are ways of getting the stuff I've written out to people now, even to make some money off of it (maybe) and I've taken steps to allow myself access to these systems--but I'm scared. More scared now that I could be on the cusp of putting my real work out into a seriously public place. 

Is it because I'm afraid people will say it's bad?

Sure, partially, no one wants to be told their work sucks. You want people to say nice things about stuff that you put yourself into, because you want people to say nice things about you. Creating something--whether it's a story or a song or a painting--is putting your mind into a physical form and saying "Look at me under my face, under the personality I have created to interact with others, look at the things I think and don't say." And that's scary, sure.

But it isn't my biggest fear. If people say my stories are bad, well, that's depressing--but at least now I have something to go on. Now I can say "This was bad, I can fix it." Or even say, "No fuck you, you have bad taste, this is good."

I'm afraid I'll put this stuff out there.

And nothing will happen.

This blog is a perfect example of that fear. I post stuff on here, link it to my Facebook, and what happens? Not much. I didn't expect it to, of course, and I'm hardly "promoting" my blog--but there's always that little part of you that wants the things you invest in to do well, even if it's the very small investment I've put into this blog.

But yeah, a few views, no comments, just...nothing.

I'm terrified that will happen with my stories. I'll slap them up for download and maybe five or ten or even twenty people get them and then nothing. No one saying "An amazing tour de force! Incredible debut!" (notice people only use those words when reviewing things? And not even everything, just, like, books and some movies), and no one saying "This is utter garbage. I'd rather read Fifty Shades of Gray fanfiction than this shit."

No, just those few downloads and then nothing, just a casual indifference to the stories--lost among the clamor of a hundred other things trying to get people's attention my stories won't amount to anything but the smallest blip possible on their radar.

I'm afraid that all the work and care and thought I put into my stories--that all of myself that I put into them--will amount to nothing more than something that is painfully, pathetically, forgettably...

average.