A Flower Drenched in Sadness

Now I know it looks just like this. Terrifying, and boring at the same time. Life doesn’t stop, or even slow down for crises. Will I wake up an American citizen   tomorrow, or an unwilling member of the Trump ‘Republic’? Does that change my income, the price of groceries? Do I need to apply for a new passport, will we be allowed to leave? Will work give us a holiday to adjust to the administrative changes or do we just say “fuck.” and show up on Monday? 

It is finally 2021, I’m a little bit drunk, and ready to begin my writing career. 

In spite of 2020 being a shit year for everyone, including me at times, I am at a better place mentally than I was 3 years ago. I am more content, due to my status as a 8-5 office worker, something I dreamed of during my 7 years in retail. This job is nothing glamorous really, but the title is, and it creates greater ease when talking to family and friends and even strangers- there’s this level of respect in American society afforded to people who work in corporate buildings, as opposed to people who work in retail chains or restaurants or farms, that I’ve never quite agreed with or understood. I make the same money here, as I did before almost. I’m not inherently more valuable to society sitting in this cube as I was sitting behind the cut-fruit bar, yet you are treated better just because you plug numbers into a computer rather than prepare food for customers. 

Anyway, all this to say, reflecting on my early 20′s, I am finding I have so many regrets from the times I was just trying to make it through every day, being so hard on myself because I felt due to my job that I didn’t measure up to my peers. Now I see that that is really silly. The number of things I sacrificed due to my lack of self confidence, feeling like I didn’t deserve to have fun or do things for myself that contradicted my sense of duty to the job that paid my bills. It’s admirable, of course, but I regret it now. For example, I have been waiting since I was a kid to see my favorite rock bands in concert. I never had the opportunity until college when I lived 40 minutes from the biggest rock festival in the southeast, where all of my friends who enjoyed the same music invited me to go with them, to see almost every band I’ve ever wanted to see within 2 days. The caveat is that it was on a weekend-retails busiest time, and almost impossible to request off. I declined, saying I couldn’t leave my team high and dry on a weekend. I would go the next year. (those friends didn’t end up going the next year, and I was in the same position of feeling dutiful on a weekend). Looking back, I could’ve insisted with my boss, he would’ve let me go. My coworkers might’ve roasted me, but I would’ve had the time of my life, and not been sitting here, 5 years later, wondering if those same bands will ever play in the same place at the same time again, if anyone will even go with me to a concert that’s now 5 hours away, if those bands will even be touring by the time this virus is gone. 

Ultraviolet (2006)

Taking direction from Suzanne Collins, I have found the best way to circumvent controversy over my book’s more *hot button* *revolutionary* theme: Hide it behind a Love Story™. 

I’ve been in the planning stages for my novel for a couple of weeks, writing back stories, figuring out the plot, and action, themes and symbols, researching technicalities-but I have become hung up on how it may be received to the general public. It is somewhat of a vigilante fiction. Something that, if it were to be successful enough to discuss widely, would most likely piss off everyone on the political spectrum. BUT, just like Katniss is able to hide her motivations of revolution behind Ye Olde Love Story, I figured out that this strategy works perfectly with my characters as well. I understand what they mean when they say that sometimes you start a story, but the pen takes on a life of it’s own and you are just along for the ride. Now I couldn’t imagine it happening any other way. 

I am beginning to get frustrated with all of my research on how to break into the world of writers-an elite league it seems. All of my reading, especially from my personal favorite writers, my idols, revolves around this *feeling* that you inherently ~know~ that you are meant to be a writer. That you were pre-destined for it and you could never have been anything else, or even think of being anything else. 

I don’t think that’s right, at least not in my experience so far. Everyone else has thought that I would grow up to be a writer, but I never thought that. I haven’t been writing stories or telling tall-tales since I was little. My poetry, though I have written a lot of it since I was little, and I have studied poetry so much, is mediocre at best **(though I love it and refuse to change it just to satisfy a contemporary audience and publishers)**;However, even if  I were to get them published, I still wouldn’t consider myself a poet any more than I do now, unpublished. I would just be someone who writes poetry from the heart when the mood strikes, in their spare time.  

I always wanted to be a scientist. I am no good at math, or anything related to STEM, with the exception of freshman level Biological Science. But the study of plants and animals and the physical world has always fascinated me. I did everything in my power leading up to junior year of college to put myself on the path of being a Doctor of Marine Biology, I was convinced that this was my ultimate destiny, the thing I was meant to do, to be on a research boat in the Pacific looking through data sheets and microscopes and scuba diving for samples. Unfortunately that dream came crashing down as I couldn’t pass the first level of chemistry or botany, and completely tanked my GPA for all time. 

Even though my strength is for the arts, languages and history, I wanted nothing to do with these subjects, except maybe as a hobby before going to bed, entertainment at most. So, I take issue with the fact that, now that I am interested in writing a book to be published and short stories, that I am not a *real* writer, just because I didn’t want it when I was younger. 

I am also a bit embittered with the fact that most writers claim that in order to succeed, you have to make writing your full time job. How can any of us with real bills to pay possibly set aside 40 hours a week, for months at a time, to be at the mercy of an agent or a publisher that may decide that hundreds of hours of your work just “isn’t what we’re looking for right now” and you have to start all over. I resent the sentiment that ‘you don’t write for money, you write for you’ because that’s a real nice declaration when you’re not under threat of becoming a homeless, starving hopeful-writer. Believe me, I would LOVE to quit my day job and weekend job to spend all my time writing my stories, but unless I win the lottery, that’s not happening. The idea that you can’t write as a hobby, that you have to let it consume you in order to be taking it seriously-”bananas”, says I. 

Young and miserable I was the last time I posted at 22 years old, but now I regret that I wasted my time, and my youth, on worries that would lead to these regrets, this time that I can never get back:

I should’ve gone dancing with him, and enjoyed being in his arms while my waist length hair swirled around us, carefree. Who cares what I did for a living? I was an artist, that’s all he had to know.

I should’ve taken the loan and focused on getting through school before I let a job drag the youth out of me. Debt is inevitable anyway. 

I should’ve kissed him that time, and seen where that path led. 

I should’ve gotten that credit card, and traveled this country while I had no ‘PTO’ hanging in the balance. I should’ve gotten on the bus, on the train, to the airports before they all shut down. 

I have been so concerned with being smart, and being practical, crossing my t’s and dotting my i’s, and before I knew it, my young life has passed me by. 

I should’ve taken more risks, been a bit more reckless. Now I’m stuck, with fine lines, burnt out hair, and chronic neck pain, and crooked teeth that make my jaw ache. and a heart that becomes more closed off by the minute.