*sigh* My self esteem has taken a hit in the solar plexus. Lucky for me, I’m used to gasping for air. However, it’s left my mindset that of the poor kid staring in the window of FAO Schwarz at Christmas. Or Ebeneezer Scrooge looking in the window at the happiness of Bob Cratchit’s family despite their lack of money. So I’m a little disconnected, a little lost today. You’ll have to forgive me my moodiness.
One night ShinyBitch told me she needed a poem for her character Sascha. Sascha was going to write a poem to her mate. Shiny was looking for poetry on the internet. A few minutes later, I gave her this:
Winter breeze cold and chill
The screams of broken hearts so shrill
You stand before me so tall and real
But hold me always, let me feel.
The path to love is long and hard
The potholes linger, like your guard
Upon me always watching, ever there
Catch my stumbles with your care
You hold me up when I’m alone
When I can’t bear the river’s moan
The shrieks of pain from winter’s night
You always shield me from its fright
To me you are the only one
Who breathes and sighs and always comes
To my side in darkness free
And lives to love no one but me.
Another time, my friend Jen, who uses the name Opalgirl on message boards and IM, was bemoaning the fact that people were writing poems for each other on the Zanctuary board, but no one had written her a poem. A few minutes later I gave her this:
She glows with a regal light
Twists and turns give forth
Fire beneath the surface
Brilliance not as like the diamond
But instead a warmth felt
From the heart out to the skin
Her moonglow in muted hues
Outshines her sisters
With understated elegance
A genius caught within
The unknown, the mysterious
She is aglow with magic
Her fire banked always
But flashing brighter than the sun
To make those self same sisters
Pale in comparison
And kneel as supplicants
To the Opal.
I’m not into writing poetry these days, although on occasion I can just slap something together like those two poems. I’m sure that neither of them would survive a critique, but both made people I care about happy, and that was all that mattered to me. With the hit to my self esteem, I’ve been sort of bashing myself internally, wondering if all the things I write only matter to a few people. I’ve been questioning my creativity, my skills. I’m no literary genius, but I somehow thought I had it in me to be something more than a technically proficient cliche.
You expect to be critiqued and judged when you put the things you write out there in this electronic media world for others to read. Somehow I’ve come away from a few recent writing experiences with the sense that I’m not expressing myself very well. When I write a piece that is meant to give the reader a sense of the character’s quietly growing despair, a spiraling swirling darkness that is sucking them in, and the reader doesn’t feel that… I can tell myself that it’s just one person. When others chime in with a “meh” attitude about it, I begin to wonder what I could have done to make that sense of quiet despair more palpable. And the answer, of course, is nothing.
I yam what I yam. My creativeness has been honed over a lot of years, and if it’s just not there… then it’s not. I’m not going to drink some magic bean juice and wake up in the morning with a brilliantly creative bean stalk of ideas sprouting from my brain as if I was a JR Ward, Nora Roberts, or Charlaine Harris. (Harris’ books have spawned a new HBO series called True Blood.) I guess I have to admit that I’m just not that creative in an original sense.
I don’t have any trouble being run of the mill and cliche on most days. I was just a little more sensitive today what with the way things have been shaking out at home and work. Tomorrow I’ll probably wonder why I ever felt as if my self esteem had taken a hit to the gut. I’ll probably look at my writing and be happy with it again. Today, I’m just gonna sigh again.
Hope your Wednesday is sigh free!
