The Worth of My Words
The worst part of heartbreak is that it is subjective. Recollection takes in only the positive moments, the dreams, the golden hours, and the shattering seems like an impossibility. There is often no explanation and no understanding of the other party’s perspective. I thought I had felt my heartbreak before, but no, I now get it.
See, I’ve never been in love with a man, but man have I been in love with writing.
In July, I cried in a library because I was surrounded not by books but by authors that had actually found that they had something to say, said it, and the world had listened. The very idea of being around those dreams that had become reality was the most surreal feeling I have felt. It was a high much like that of standing under stage lights while the audience stood in ovation, but it was better.
In August, I found the courage to actually commit to being in a library. I quit my day job to complete extensive, long, painful applications to graduate school for my Masters in the Fine Arts of Writing. It should have been terrifying to leave behind a steady paycheck but, nothing has ever felt so natural as to commit to a craft.
In December, after hours and hours and even more hours of studying for the GRE, taking the GRE, working three part-time jobs, curating thirty pages of my manuscript, researching and writing a fifteen-page critical analysis of Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz, guest lecturing, writing six statements, and figuring out what in the hell a CV was, I submitted my applications and literally jumped around my house like a child in celebration.
I spent so much of that holiday season laying under the tree looking up at the lights from the vantage point of a present just imagining this life I may have come September. I’d be walking along the lakefront after a grueling workshop, steaming milk in a coffee shop, thinking about modernist literature and how the marriage plot could be defied in my own work. It felt like I was falling in love, deeper in love, with a vocation that could actually become reality.
My Christmas wish was spent on that hopefulness.
Well, I feel like we all have gathered what happened by now.
Two applications still hang in the balance. The prospect of living out the dream of a receiving an MFA remains. However, the initial “no” felt like my life up to this point was for naught. My words, my careful, meaningful, curated, loving words had no worth.
My writing has been rejected before and I haven’t cared. I followed Stephen King’s advice in wearing rejection as if it was a trophy for pursuit. Yet, this felt different. This was, to me, a letter telling me that I was not a writer.
The drama queen I am certainly emerged. I packed my books in boxes and vowed to never write again. I refused to read, I refused to listen to music, I refused to celebrate the fulfilled dreams of others by engaging in it. I even walked past my favorite bookstore and scowled at it.
But, hey, Myopic Books does not deserve my anger. My pens do not deserve to be collected in a box next to my insanely extensive Fitzgerald collection.
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest wouldn’t fit in the last of my boxes and it felt like a sign. The post-modernist’s defiance sat at the foot of my bed as a visual depiction of the rebellion that my art had always been.
Never did I look to books, to writing, to art, as a form of acceptance. Words, mine and others, had always been other worlds in which my mind was tested.
Writing didn’t want to break my heart, it didn’t actually, it probably will again and again, but it didn’t mean to. It wasn’t writing itself that hurt me , it was I wanted writing to be. I wanted to be in that library standing amongst the others I saw before me so bad that I forgot what that meant.
This is going to be the cheesiest thing I think I will ever write but, alas, here it goes: the worth of my words has never lied in what others think of them but their presence at all.
My words are my last thought at night and my first thought in the morning. Phrasing, poetry, vocabulary, pushing the boundaries of worlds are always within me.
My love affair with writing will always be purposeful.
When I stood in that library and literally pictured Richard Yates, Sylvia Plath, and my favorite, Zelda Fitzgerald, I had imagined them determined to speak, that’s all they wanted to do and that’s what they did. It really doesn’t matter where I will do it, whether it’s in Wisconsin, or Michigan, or in a classroom of my own, I’ll still speak. Writing and I will always be in love.
