An Effort Between Affirmations and Reality
My body always takes the 8 hours it needs. It’s good because then I won’t feel excessively tired afterwards. Although I don’t think I should feel tired at all. The day started in the same loop today. Woke up to the garbage truck, the fruit seller, and Papa waking up too. I slept thinking about something pertinent. I slept thinking about the reader and the listener. Who am I writing for? I had read a few poems that won the Oxford Poetry Prize; the major difference is that they had a very definitive voice. I think I have a voice, too. You can’t write without a voice, but you still do not know how to use it well. Or just simply be confident of it. Take these, are these journal entries, are these essays, are these a magical 3rd genre? Are journals like this? I have more questions than answers, and while that may not be the worst thing in the world, it certainly is inconvenient for me. I can do with some answers right now — but if I told the things I know to my past self, I wouldn’t be where I am, I needed to be the idiot then to be whatever I am today. Maybe I need to be this to go where I will from this. The prospect of the future scares me like nothing has scared me in a while. How will I be able to do anything at all? I don’t know. I do know this, that the mountain of being a writer is now a bigger mountain of being a partner and being responsible. I didn’t know I could be responsible.
Small victories come to mind. I celebrate small victories and then I get happy and complacent right then and there. Imagine running a marathon, and as you finish the half, you sit right there. “I haven’t finished a half marathon ever, this is big, I can sit.” You can — but you cannot stop running. And eventually, if you end up sitting for 5 years, you almost forget how to run.
Don’t despair. What you do need is quite simply to be able to sit down and write. If the poetry that is winning has a voice, find a voice. If the prose isn’t understandable, write more of it. You did think it was worthy of publication a few days back, why not now? You have written nice things, you write about memory and the shared human fears and consciousness. You tell stories. You are a storyteller. Why do you keep forgetting that? You don’t think writers wrote to give themselves affirmations like these. Well, who cares, you won’t be Kafka, even Kafka wasn’t Kafka before he died, he lived all his life in never being able to admit that he can be a good writer, or rather is one. A cockroach-like existence that never could admit till the last that he is good. Is that the kind of person you look up to? What about Hemingway, about Manto! Manto, such a fierce man, you haven’t read Manto in so long. Why don’t you pick up one of his stories again?