I Don’t Like The Way I Write

I still remember the night when I stopped trying to improve my writing. After a life of imagining story after story but never writing anything down I enrolled in a creative writing course. After a week I finally got the task of writing a short story imitating the writing style of Julio Cortázar. I knew he was one of your favorite authors. At every paragraph, the excitement of sharing it all with you increased as my short story grew ever more concise and complete. I was excited to find out how my own personal style would show up at the end of the course.

You weren’t as excited as me when you figured out that I was writing in his style. You had accused me of plagiarism, unoriginality and quickly deconstructed my writing in order to find every fault in it. Instead of arguing about it and explain the reason behind it, I retreated. At that time I was already tired of arguing and wanted to introduce something fresh and rather constructive to our conversations. Instead, I silently turned in the story next class, where there were compliments, but I don’t even remember them. I went back home and deleted the short story from my computer and never went back to that class again. That’s the kind of relationship I had with her.

And with myself.

I wrongly let someone else value my worth. When the time came of valuing something so precious as my writing, my potential of actually putting my stories on paper in an endearing manner, the verdict came out negative.

It took me years to gather up enough confidence to write again, but rather than writing fiction and sharing it with everyone I kept writing privately about myself and my past experiences. Probably, in order to get to know myself a little better. It is during these exercises that I realized a very important thing: all this time, my self-worth was incredibly poor.

It takes little to be honest when you write. You just have to resist the urge to lie to yourself. You notice the truth in your words when your story turns out to be quite unglamorous and probably very shameful, but after reading it again you come to understand some things. You get the opportunity to actually listen to yourself.

Instead of looking for answers in others, many of them were within myself all along.

We liked each other while she still had a boyfriend. I ignored the unrealistic expectations of someone that saw in me somebody that I wasn’t because I was so engrossed with the idea of letting someone “love” me. Then, I even allowed myself to be cheated on as long as I was feeling “loved”. I accepted the love I believed to deserve. I felt that it was all that I could get. Thinking back, I was suspicious of demonstrations of love I wasn’t expecting. I missed the kindness of others because I wouldn’t allow myself to let them show me something I “didn’t ask for”.

I was, like her, seeking love for the most selfish of reasons without even knowing how to give it in a healthy manner. Even if I did receive it, if it wasn’t from someone I wanted or expected it from, I was quick to ignore it and keep longing for those I had already decided I wanted to receive love from. I once even “wished I had received this kind of confession from the one I wanted to hear it from”. It all was nothing short of wanting to use others in order to get high off “love”.

Truth is, I was looking for my own self worth in others. I hand-picked those I wanted to see myself great in the eyes of, and handed them the power over something I’m only myself able of doing: loving myself. I still see myself falling back to my old ways from time to time, but conscious effort is why I realized what I was doing wrong, and it’s also what saves me from falling back for too long. After believing in the seductive magic of everything falling together into place and seeing where that took me for a ride I decided that, like with most of the world’s greatest things, love is also the product of conscious effort.

All that time, all I was trying to do was impossible in the end. Of course love isn’t like any of this.

I still don’t like the way I write, but I do it anyways. I don’t even need you to like it.

But it’d be nice.