“You," he
said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I
believe, is why you are in so much pain.”
Emilie Autumn
I’m a writer who
cannot write.
This is a hard
admission to make considering the fact that words are pretty much my only
currency and comfort in this world. It is words that have saved me time and
again from both myself and my feelings by opening up a sidelong segue into a
blind alley of thought. And yet, it appears that words are the very things that
fail me now. I find myself cornered by people who can manage and manipulate
words far more efficiently and proactively than I, rendering my efficacy rather
redundant.
And yet, I am
rediscovering my relationship with words as I catch myself exploring newer
kitsch schemes to motivate my students with their writing. I find myself
writing under the influence quite often. Currently I am writing under the
influence of oranges, post-run adrenaline, Sunday morning sidewalks and
lingering guilt. Such alchemy forms a jittery, jarring sort of high that is
rather difficult to navigate with any sort of clarity.
I am living on a
university campus again, though not as a student this time around. This
distinction is important, I find, because it is one I often need to remind myself
exists. I feel I am finally at a stage in my life where I could let myself
succeed at something. Ironically, as it happens, being surrounded by
perpetually positive and self-assured people is proving to be a good thing. I
have often been told that whereas most people suffer from high or low
self-esteem I suffer, unequivocally from what can only be described as ‘no self
esteem’. Often enough, I find it a gift. I used to think that it allowed me to
take a microscope to things rather than a mere magnifying glass because I never
feared the collapse of my own ego. Sadly, it also means that the things I am
searching for seldom come to light. They live in a sad little laboratory,
neatly labeled and bottled away from light, dust and…life.
The realization that I
have been living most of my life on tomorrows and yesterdays is hankering. I
suppose, in some way most people do this to some extent- live amid the flimsy
glands of postponement and atonement. But I seem to have mastered it: my mind
is riddled with masterful schemes and plans of my future…all doable ideas but
all irrevocably marked with one lowest common denominator: tomorrow. I can
almost never meet deadlines unless they are about work and this is why my
writing suffers perpetually. I can never consider it work, even though a part
of me recognizes like Cohen says ‘that I
needed to go to work at it everyday’.
I am also living with
and among people again and this is oddly exhilarating and debilitating in equal
measure. I am judgmental. Did I tell you that? Or have you surmised as much by
now? I judge and measure everything. I suppose the only saving grace is that I
judge myself more than anyone else and certainly the harshest but my philosophical
underpinnings reiterate that this is the wisest course. A course that allows me
to cut through the layers of narcissism and pandering in given conversations to
the core of people thereby deleting most of them out of my minds ‘to-know-list’
and yet this leads me to believe that having a refined bull-shit censor may not
always be such a good thing. I have never been able to claim I am ‘fabulous’ at
something or even moderately ‘talented’ or ‘smart’. Having maintained
throughout my life that people who do so lack a very basic sense of scale and
sensibility…after all, what does it matter how good ‘I say I am’ at anything.
Doesn’t quality control and peer-review define the standard of all things? And
yet, in a culture where self-aggrandizement dominates the curve and self-deprecation
is no longer in fashion, I am perpetually struggling with my sense of both
selves. I am a narcissist who is perpetually humble - it is the worst sort of
contradiction to live with because one can’t luxuriate in the superiority of
either.
Currently, I am
enjoying the long-forgotten sensation of having a crush. It is rather
refreshing because amid all my confusion and paranoia it has allowed me to
construct a fantasy around someone else other than myself for a change. I enjoy
crushes, mostly because I am acutely aware of their limitations. I never get
involved and religiously avoid the subject of the crush because it destroys the
illusion, which is the whole point of having a crush really. I am spending a
disproportionate amount of my evenings at the LUMS Jammin Java café reading
David Foster Wallace and subtly spying on someone else reading something else.
It is comfortable. I always maintain that the easiest way to cure a crush is to
speak with the subject. The same is often true of relationships as well.
I suppose my downward
spiral began three days after I shifted to my new apartment. At the time, I was
alone and neither of my flat mates had arrived. I was perfectly giddy about all
my New Year changes and suddenly one silly, Saturday evening I found myself
over-estimating my coping capabilities and decided to Google my ex. Suffice it
to say, that Googling your ex is always, always, Always a bad idea. We all tend to operate on myths of closure and
then we construct waiting periods, coping periods, healing periods and
getting-back-out-there periods for relationships purely because we need all
experiences to be time-bound. This allows us a construct to move in and on
from. In truth, there is no real science to moving on and how one does it but I
can unequivocally say that discovering how much better your former half is
doing without you is not one of them. Even if the same is equally true for you.
I am working hard this
month, this particular February, on being less afraid. Afraid of wanting things
I feel I don’t deserve. Afraid of being more than I currently am and afraid of
not being who I may regret not becoming at some point in the near future.
Wading through ennui is disconcerting but necessary at a point in one’s life
where the precipice isn’t so much about discovering who you are anymore but
rather about being comfortable with who you are or revising the status quo. Sometimes
I feel I was born afraid and then I recognize that this isn’t the case…I see
pictures of myself as a child, cheeky and facile and I realize that I am no
longer the person that child could have grown up to be. Instead I am this mass,
mess of floundering feeling encased in frost and humor. It’s a sickening
realization.
One of my friends
recently told me that perhaps I needed to ‘start at the beginning’.
Burning bridges and
looking back. I have never really ‘looked back’, it’s not how I’m…built. And yet, for the past few days
the temptation has been alarmingly great. Perhaps it’s because there are no
good films to watch and I can’t seem to read at the same pace I once could. So
at present, I am merely letting my fingers clap at keys with my mind numb.
According to Sean Connery in Finding
Forrester, it sometimes serves the purpose of beginning an actual thought.
Just ….typing. I am working - surprisingly hard - at creating a moment at
present and I have never had to work at it before. The music selection is
sublime for scaring up some sentiment: unhealthy dealings of Dylan, Cohen and
the occasional Joni Mitchell. There are
also culinary conduits…cheese and wine, no going wrong there. I’ve even painted
after years…I’ve scribbled thoughts and yet for a change I want to be nakedly
honest and I am afraid that is too scary. I want to write out something that
isn’t pretty, poised and poignant…or forever attempting to be. I want to write
something visceral, brutal, hurtful…to lash out at all the fucking assholes who
have stomped over me simply because I was stupidly considerate enough to not
stop them doing so. It is no life-altering recognition acknowledging that one
is a pushover after 30 years or having been one, however it is alarming to
discover that one has lost the ability to side-step the default position carved
out to stick into.
It’s a cruel fallacy
folded in flawed familiarity.
Sometimes I wish it
were still a noble aspiration to be a librarian. To be satisfied merely being a
keeper of books without needing to be a great reader or writer. Do you ever
feel that? Watching some garish, sappy romantic comedy where a single, happy,
healthy female protagonist lives in some ridiculously romantic setting running
a book store…isn’t it sublime…until she recognizes her life still isn’t
complete because she’s single. Sadly, I can’t even aspire to being a book-store
manager in Pakistan because my education dooms me to far more lofty aspirations
but I wish I could move away and live in a rinky-dink town someday running a
bookstore…not one of those Barnes & Nobles, Borders behemoths but a tiny
nook-in-the-corner shop, with old musty smells and tight corners one could hide
away into. Just enough customers to keep you going but not enough to keep you
well.
I wish I had just
enough ambition to allow me to write one book and no more. I have been told
that it is only the first book that belongs to an author, everything that
follows is tainted by expectation…someone else’s expectation. I now know that
my book will be about the books I have read and the person they have made me.
My only consistent companions in life and my only solace, the only geniuses who
do not judge me and in whose company I feel secure and not stunted. Each
chapter an o’mage to a novel shaping a person into another person and searching
for all the ‘something missing-s’ to fill that layer of a character.
I have my first
sentences:
This is a book about …other books. Better
books. This is a book that will shamelessly borrow and covert the best turns of
phrases, plagiarize the most sibilant philosophies and romanticize the
un-romantic. This book is borrowed from all the books that have written it
because She borrowed from all that she read.
They say write
what you know. Well I am a reader…that is really all I know I know. I am hoping, once again, that it will be words
that will bring me out of this mess if only I would have the courage,
conviction and dedication to keep writing them. I am perversely inspired by DT
Max’s eulogy for Wallace in The New Yorker, published a few years after his
death in September 2012, he said “…What
all these residua of his life have in common is that they are testaments to
Wallace’s belief in the power of words. Even when things were at their worst,
as, sadly, they often were for him, David was writing; if not poems, then
fiction. If not fiction, then letters. He used words to wound, words to heal,
words to persuade, words to enchant. But in the end, despite their
potency—never more compelling than in his hands—these symbolic representations
of thought and feeling couldn’t save David: not from his mental disease or from
his ambition to be more than just another remarkable writer… So today, on the
anniversary of his death, on September 12, 2008, it seems right to echo the
narrator of his late, brilliant suicide story, “Good Old Neon,” on a copy of
which he annotated, “Ghosts talking to us all the time—but we think their
voices are our own thoughts,” and end, as he did, with: “Not another word.”
One would think that
this would put me off from telling my own stories - perhaps equally sordid- but
it doesn’t. If anything, wherever, I am. Words are always good company and I
could use more of them. I could construct some kind of meaning in and about
myself through them and I have always needed ‘meaning’ more than anything else
in this world.
Wallace once said that
“The purpose of fiction is to combat
loneliness” and yet it has been ages since I have read a novel. It used to
be the only thing I was once capable of doing. I would even dream in voice-over
dialogues because the words were always prettier than people. Come to think of
it that still hasn’t changed. And I am
lonely. Comfortably lonely.
That is finally
beginning to scare me.
