I developed a huge part of my identity around
the idea of being a writer during the first half of my high school career. Writing
became the thing I could point to and say, “That’s mine. I made that.” The most
important writing I did was for my blog, Moonwaves
iWonder. Keeping a blog meant expressing myself when I felt alone and
repressed at the technical school I went to as a freshman, and later as a history
of fond memories of friends and family and important events in my life.
I was a true hobbyist blogger, talking about my life and
pontificating about the deeper meaning of it all. Occasionally, friends and
family would chide me for my posts. They pointed out to me how one sided I
could be when describing an issue, and how there are some things that just
shouldn’t be posted on the internet. To this day I censor myself when posting
to Facebook and Tumblr (though I’m still a bit of a loose cannon on Twitter).
There’s something to be said for the voluntary following of other people’s
posts and one’s freedom of speech, but I definitely appreciate the lesson my
small band of readers taught me. There are a lot of things I want(ed) to write
about and share with an audience that I’m glad I have not – because I really
doubt I could handle the consequences of those words.
I retired iWonder
when I felt it no longer fulfilled those desires of expressing myself, and when
I felt that my personal stories were becoming boring drivel that no one would
care about but me. To some extent I think it was the right choice. The life of
a straight, white, middle class, Protestant boy high school student from
Massachusetts, whose life consisted of little more than video games, mediocre
cycling and swimming, and internal psychological conflicts, is definitely not
the most interesting thing in the world. Internet personalities like Charlie
McDowell, Bryarly Bishop and the Vlogbrothers later showed me how to be
successful talking about yourself on the internet: by not just being and
speaking and writing interestingly, but by doing interesting things. These
people start giant charity organizations, create original works and travel to
exotic locations for more than just the pleasure of travel. They capture their
viewers attention by doing interesting things and telling interesting stories. Needless
to say, I wasn’t doing many interesting things in high school.
I could have been telling more interesting stories, though. I
can’t count the number of story ideas I had in high school that I abandoned for
mindlessly pursuing video games or friends who would never fully reciprocate my
desire for companionship. The few stories I wrote weren’t even that good,
because I never really put my heart into them (see: my senior project, New Babylon, which was truly awful).
Between my lack of writing and my writing failures I gradually lost the desire
to write, to speak my mind and to think imaginatively. I would even argue that
my writing has become less eloquent, and that it’s lost the unique voice that I
once thought I could cultivate into a career. This is all rather sad, the death
of an artist and what not, but it’s kind of a serious issue since I’m paying a
university to eventually give me a piece of paper that says I’m a good writer.
Maybe I still am a good writer. I wrote all this, after all. And
lately I’ve felt the desire to write again – a stirring of my mind that feels
like an old friend, my muse, returning from a long journey to embrace me and
tell me stories of its absence. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. I left my
muse, and now I’m returning to tell it tales that I might write for it.
I am still a writer. Just not the writer I used to be.
