my neuroses is getting the best of me

I’m sitting at my computer too scared to write. Nervous that whatever dribble I manage to squeeze out of my mind’s eye won’t be good enough. I’ve been reading memoirs of famous writers and watching movies about rock star journalists and wondering if my life could ever be like that. I didn’t start writing stories as soon as I could pick up pen; I wasn’t that lonely kid who sat at the back of the class all day long with his nose buried in imaginative pages of some live I wish was my own. I was normal. Compared to most of my friends I was successful, I was well read; but in the grand scheme of wannabe famous writers I was nowhere close. I choose to write. I didn’t have a passion for it. I was just good at it. When I was in grade seven my dad asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I had nothing, so he asked what I was good at, what I liked in school. I replied that essays were the best part – they were easy, they came naturally. I still remember the way the living room smelt at that moment. The way the leather couch, layered with pubescent cookie crumbs and spilled apple juice, felt beneath me. My dad was doing his ironing in front of the Sunday football game he faked interest in. He asked me if wanted to be writer and I said I did. Some years later in while I was in college my dad was trying to get his book published. He’d ben working on for as long as I can remember. A professor friend of his told him that if he was half the writer his son was he should have no problem. When he recounted this story to me over the telephone I got that same feeling of jubilation as I did that first day in my living room when I chose to write. That is the thing about writing. I can’t separate myself from it. People have these delusions that writing is some sort of pure passion; that I do it for it for it’s own sake. This is disingenuous if not a all out lie. Every word that I write I want someone to read. I don’t do because it makes me feel good; I write because want people to listen to me, I want them to congratulate me a on a job well done. Kant was completely full of shit. There is no separating myself, there is no pure intention. If I save a kid from drowning there is at least part of me that did it because people would think I was nice guy. If I write it’s because I want people to think that I am smart and witty. I want to be smart and witty. And the more I write the witter and the smarter I seem to get so keep going. For no reason at all I start writing, imagining that one day when I’m famous cultural junkies and literary historians will scour my folded napkins, scribbled notebooks, and worn out hardrives for an original Charles Hamilton. The unpublished early works. Pretentious I know, but that is half of what writing is I think. Imagining yourself as somebody else, pretending to be somebody else. Pretending that people will actually care about what you think. You have to have the guts to think that you are worth the ink your words are printed in. If your lucky, maybe they will be.