Writing, Toilet Seats, and Everything in Between

This terrible feeling of never being able to achieve what seems so dear to my heart is pulling me down into ravines of ghastly, sinister, Edgar Allan Poe’s mind-like, darkness. In this jungle of bottomless dross, the struggle between working to pay my bills and doing something to pay respect to my passion seems long and pointless. Can I really write? Or is this just one more dream? With hours dwindling to nothing as my life progresses, how will I accommodate variegated things writing well requires?

I see myself in this world, evolving, learning more, more about the mechanics of this world, which makes me confident about publishing something soon. But then when I see myself having not published anything, having not received any professional feedback, I find myself stuck in a bubble of self-fulfilling thoughts and feelings. Is it not just a figment of my mind, where I’m a great writer and my books bestsellers? So why bother? One moment I’m a writer, and the other, one more of 3 billion people who write and publish, many on them on their deathbeds.

My friends say two-and-a-half years is not long enough a period of time for you to put so much unnecessary pressure on yourself, but what seems pressure to my friends is actually the high standard of reading and writing I seek to maintain, and while maintaining it, I fall into this ditch of excessive dreaming. It hurts me then, and I cry, not always with tears, but with a heart-tearing grunt. Why is writing so difficult? Why does it involve so many dimensions? Why do I have to read The Economist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, and Sri Bhagavadgita, all at once, in one day, and when finished flitting between these authors and books, listen to my girlfriend’s distress calls that I don’t spend enough time with her? Am I really wasting my time doing something I don’t fully understand the scope of?

Last year, I spent sleepless nights working on English grammar, and this year I spent time filling out forms for writer’s workshops. I got a hang of the language, but I am too fucking old to fully digest something only an infant can swallow: I am too fucking rotten, barren, and hopeless that no crop of structural congruity can ever grow strong. I always run into messiahs of language piety. Between the English grammar and writer’s workshop phase, which was jeopardized by shortage of money and the bitches’ reluctance to give me aid, I found myself seated on the western-style toilet seat (I live in the godforsaken US of A) pushing so hard that my intestines might squeeze out but not turds, reading American Usage and Style books, feeling a whit in comparison to 900 pages of finely printed word-feast.

There, there I stand, on the platform of utter confusion and simple-heartedness, maybe simple-mindedness too, trying to solve this conundrum of life. Why live?—to write? Sure!

It took me 15 minutes to write this piece of crap, and I'm not willing to revise it, edit it. Yes, to hell with it. And It takes me three months to write a short-story, which is read by three people, all friends with a slightly piquant literary tastes. So where is the balance? No balance—just a dream of broken aspirations, or a broken dream of just aspirations. Amen.