I’m not particularly skilled at manual labor. I’m terrible at giving directions to people and vacillate between being dictatorial or mute.
And behind a keyboard, I’m still not particularly skilled. I channel the unrelenting monologue in my head. It could be on any given topic and at any given time, and it simply is.
Writing has helped me process both success and failure, and it scares me sometimes. I get intimidated that I’ll sound stupid, jumbled, that I’m not as good as I used to be.
But I write because I have to, not because I want to. I’d go crazy without the opportunity to voice these thoughts, for better or for worse.
I’m envious of those who can move seamlessly between fiction and nonfiction, and are deft enough to create new worlds as they are in describing rote data.
I’m not one of those people. Every time I try to write fiction it comes off as a grocery list. I’m too literal, too focused on what *is*.
So I have this outlet, though I hesitate to call it an “ability”, and if I don’t come off as a pompous prick then I’ve done okay. I’m more pitiful than pitiable, and hope maybe I could be a cautionary tale at best.
As I look back, I see the mistakes I made, the poor choices that couldn’t even be justified in retrospect with the information available at the time. The more I write about them, the more I realize they’re common experiences, that they’re not discrete moral failures in a vacuum but threads woven into the shitty quilt of humanity.
There’s so many things I’ll never be able to forgive myself for. But I’ll keep writing. I’ll be 100 years old, hands knurled like Albion oak, and I’ll keep writing. I’ll never be a writer, but I’ll keep writing.
I’ll keep writing, because there will always be a story to tell.
