The Writer and The Ink-less Pen

A short story about shortcomings and long-winded personal essays.

Since I developed an intense personality in early middle school, everyone around me started assigning careers I should pursue. The main ones: a lawyer or a writer. And because I love choosing the hardest path up the mountain, I decided to write.

I’ve written in notebooks, Word and Google documents, emails, post-it notes, hotel notepads, old passports, CD jackets, grocery store receipts and folded napkins. I’ve kept a record of my thoughts, decisions, intentions, preferences, ideas and plans. There’s not a single thing that has crossed my mind and not become a written statement on some sort of medium.

But I can never fully write about myself. 

If you gave me a blank piece of paper and asked me about any topic I could spill dozens of paragraphs about my opinion on it. But the moment I’m asked about myself, the pen runs out of ink. The sentences don’t form correctly, the words make no sense and when I read back the text it looks like nonstop rambling about anything but me.

I’m doing it right now, too.

Over the years, I have gotten better at hiding the fact that all my personal essays were anything but personal. I thought if I could start every sentence with “I” or end them with “me” maybe the reader would be fooled into thinking they know me.

None of it really worked. The moment someone who knew me read my work they would look puzzled and upset. Why are you hiding in there? I thought the answer was simply that artists love to show the world how they see it and not how the world sees them. But truly, I was just avoiding looking at a mirror with the same judgment I look at everyone else.

I learned about self-love a little too late in my life, but I think I’ve gotten better at accepting who I am and how I’m seen over the years. So I hope this rambling non-personal abstract of my life does not represent everything else I write. 

Now I see that I can be the artist as much as I can be the muse. I accept a lot more the little things I like that used to make me insecure: the music I listen to, the shows I watch, all the random history facts I can recite or my obsession with haunted places. I let my personality show more often in my incessant and pretentious writing and I forgive myself when I go back and read it. And I do so because I’ve learned that who you are never really changes. I still like the color orange, listen to One Direction unironically, write poetry in my notebook and laugh when I cry. So disliking who I am and trying to hide behind my writing feels like hurting the little girl who just wanted to see the world and become a published author.

Now that I see myself as someone I owe compassion to, the pen rarely runs out of ink when I write about me. So I decided I owed it to myself to start this as something new. Welcome to the blog!