Admission of Guilt

How I found out I wanted to write and why I hate myself for not doing it.

I saw an interview that Matty Healy of the 1975 did where he talks about the fact that all the people who journal as adults have always journaled and they feel weird when they don’t. It bothered me enough that after I watched the YouTube short of that comment, I went and watched the whole video, all 147 minutes of it.

I realised something then, that what I consume is very selective and that I, like a small child being given small bits of carrot to eat to get me used to eating vegetables, have to be coaxed by the algorithm into enjoying something. I may not think the Big Bang theory is a good show, but after watching enough clips of Georgie and [insert Sheldon’s sister-in-law] falling in and out of love pre and post having a child, I still flick over to Netflix, and mindlessly consume the first 6 episodes of Young Sheldon, a shameless and straightforward, yet surprisingly heartfelt spin-off.

But that wasn’t the segue I intended. What I really wanted to say is that I have, maybe since university desperately wanted to inhabit the self-defined identity of “writer”. After drowning myself in content, movies, tv shows, constructed worlds, I was further submerged by the YouTube algorithm into a world of video essays. It was a world where meaning lay in every word, every scene transition, and where the thing that gave me comfort i.e. watching the same shows, the same movies, the same books, all had value. I felt for awhile like I belonged in that world. The world of intellectualising pop-culture, of breaking down culture into its constituent pieces of information and seeing all those things. But at some point I hit my first road block. While I could articulate (to some degree) what I was thinking and feeling to someone in the throes of a heated discussion, it felt empty and looking back I don’t remember if it was that weird Jake Gyllenhaal movie Velvet Buzzsaw about the terror of art criticism or just the pseudo-intellectual sameness of every fake hot-take wore me out, but I just couldn’t care less.

Criticism and analysis in most cases felt without purpose, empty and unappealing. Because from a creative perspective, deconstruction is an incomplete undertaking and it requires a subsequent construction of meaning to create some value. And because it took me so long to realise that, for a long time I was scared to write. Because if I started now, I would feel like a fraud, that I would have fallen behind everyone else, and I was be ashamed to be a writer who wasn’t a “writer”. I thought people would think I was trying too hard to be something that I wasn’t born to be. Childish as I was/am, my solution was to do nothing, and only write when I felt like I wanted to – don’t practise, that’s lame and you’ll suck, don’t talk to other people about it, you’re not a writer like them… if you show them your work they’ll see that you have no voice, no flair. And I wasn’t necessarily wrong either – I showed one guy I knew something I wrote and he said to me “Yeah haha. I used to write stuff like that back in high school”. High school? Motherfucker, I am 22 and I’m writing like a 16 year old? Why should I keep going? So I stopped, and I only wrote when I felt like I needed to, when I felt shit, when the world felt chaotic and meaningless to me, and I didn’t practise.

From there it got stupider. I’d always kind of viewed life in terms of a larger structure and ordered reality in terms of story. Through years of aimless deconstruction, I developed some vocabulary to deconstruct my life and reality as if it was a story. A story I could write without being judged because I didn’t put anything on paper. I was a “writer” without doing any writing I thought. And for a long time, I was okay with just doing that – talking to people I liked/loved about writing, thinking about writing, doing everything but the writing itself.

But today, I saw that interview clip. And I watched it over and over again. And I watched the interview three times. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I don’t necessarily know that I’m going to change, but I thought I should at least commit to paper how I’ve felt but never really articulated over the last few years.

So this is an admission of guilt, for not being the thing I wished I was. For being a writer, someone who is to spec scripts, to scenes, pages filled with dialogue, like Jerry Seinfeld was to the comedy circuit, not just a gym rat, but someone who found that their only way to live was to practise their craft.

If I’m honest, I don’t feel as though confession has fully absolved me, but who knows, maybe I’ll start writing more.