The bad news is that I have no idea what I’m doing.The good news is that the aforementioned bad news has not yet sent me into an existential crisis. (Or maybe it has, but if this is an existential crisis, then I find it all rather disappointing. I would expect there to be more tears and fireworks, both literal and figurative.)
Mostly, I am fascinated by my own inconstancy. I love new projects with a hideous, wild abandon, which explains the hundreds of dollars worth of expensive merino yarn crowning the dresser like some sort of home-decor Pinterest project gone wrong. How many sweaters have I knit, you may ask? (Hint: less than one.) My hands cramped far too badly to ever become anything more than an amateur fiber artist, so I set my sights on becoming someone who paints birdhouses instead. (I’m not sure what that person might look like, but I’m fairly certain that I’d like to be them.) Unfortunately, I was unable to become the Monet of the birdhouse world because I had to buy the paint. And the brushes. And the sealant. And the book on how to paint. By the time I recovered from the Walmart trip, I didn’t even have the energy to peel the plastic shrink wrap off the paint bottle. There’s now a streaky white birdhouse sitting on my front porch — or at least, I think there is. I can’t say for certain because I refuse to acknowledge it. (We all know that staring abject failure in the face isn’t good for the skin.)
When I was nineteen, writing was easy. (Or maybe it was just life in general that was easy, but nineteen-year-old Kelsey certainly didn’t think so.) My days were spent in one of two ways: I was either committing indecent acts of love, longing, and self-reflection, or I was writing poetry about those same indecent acts of love, longing, and self-reflection. Simple. I lined my pockets with loose stanzas and slept on a bed of cliche metaphors each night. It was easy and rich and I loved every damn moment of it.
So then how do I explain what happened next? There’s no sense in any of it, and all I know is that it stopped being easy. I stopped loving it. One day, for reasons that are vague and tenuous, I stopped writing and focused my energies on painting birdhouses and knitting sweaters. Why? Who knows. Maybe because you don’t ache when you paint a birdhouse and sweaters don’t sap your emotional strength (at least, not the way I was knitting them).
Here is the thing: I’m deliciously and unbearably human, but I demand to be loved in spite of all my failings. There are those who say they don’t want pity, and then there’s me. Pity me. Love me. Tell my my hair is shiny. Tell me that the world has enough sweaters already. That’s what I want, but it’s not what I need.
Now I find myself staring down the computer screen and wondering what will come next in my perpetual quest to embrace the Next New Thing. I hope that I can harness this unbridled desire to return to my roots, but I’ve lived this story before. I already know the ending. Girl writes. Girl stops writing. Girl writes again. Girl starts a blog because that is what one does when they want to be a writer. Girl can’t think of anything to write, and so she buries her head in the sand for five years. Girl yearns to feel words stuck between her teeth and opens up a blank word document. Girl is torn between poetry and short stories and picture books and planning for National Novel Writing Month and grading Spanish quizzes. Mostly, girl is tired. Girl writes the word “girl” over one thousand times during the course of her blog entry and wonders if she should replace it with the word “woman.”
You’d think there would be some sort of message behind all of this rambling, but if there is, I haven’t found it yet. I just keep spitting out words and hoping they fall into the shape of something useful, which, if you think about it, sounds remarkably similar to the general process of creating stories. I may not know what I’m doing, but I’m definitely doing something.
Please, please let these words be more powerful than half-painted birdhouses.
Kelsey Sorge 