Rebuilding the Destroyed Bridges
31-Day Writing Challenge #1
I woke up from this dream once.
I watched a girl who looked just like fall from the sky. Her body was merely a skeleton of thoughts and secrets and fantasies. She was barely a person at all, but an idea of one. A dream hoping to be fulfilled.
But her blood was red and it poured out for miles. I write from now on with it on my fingers.
Rustle, rustle, crack. This is the sound that I have grown used to, the sound that replaces the satisfying scratch of a pencil on a page. Instead, I tear another page out of my journal, which is getting increasingly thin as each day passes by. I crumple it up, tear it into a million pieces. The little shreds float their way down into the trash can, joining my other rejects.
The bridge — a vital connection I had created to my writing — collapses.
Yesterday, I thought I couldn’t be further from the writer I still desired so hotly to be. And today, I prove myself wrong by burning the remaining threads that kept me bonded to the version of myself who once thought she could be a writer and could cross the unstable bridge to the other side.
I still remember being close to achieving this dream. The overworked student and the strange dreamer were nearly one and the same. Then I lost my way. I let the demands of my life steal the joy I once had. I watched the writer fall from the sky just as the bridge was collapsing and crash to the ground far below. I watched her bleed a river that was miles long, helpless and so utterly defeated with no clue what to do.
I haven’t written in months, and that, of course, is my own fault. The torn up pages were all that kept my dilapidated bridge intact, and I destroyed pages of ideas that I dismissed as horrible. And maybe they were but it still would have been better than nothing.
Despite this, this fear of being mediocre is what keeps pushing me back from the person I used to be. The idea of just being two steps above “nothing” is terrifying. There is no reason not to give up on mediocrity, except that its very presence is all you have left. Without it, you would have nothing.
The only thing worse than mediocre is nothing. But in these circumstances, I am left to pick the lesser of two evils.
And what an obstacle it is. If only the resistance weren’t there; if only the wind didn’t blow so violently against me whenever I set foot on the bridge that was between me and the flow of creativity.
Perhaps it would be easier not to care and be more forgiving towards my words. Then mediocrity wouldn’t be such a scary thing.
What I Miss Most
Losing the connection to writing is not the thing that saddens me the most. It is not even the overwhelming feeling of satisfaction of having a piece do decently.
It was the process of building that bridge and finding the materials to make it sturdy and safe enough to walk. Most of all, it was discovering why I was building it in the first place, and how important this connection was to me.
Waging War Against Mediocrity
I am done fighting a war that will be inevitably lost, against an enemy that I created, against a phenomenon that doesn’t have to be the enemy at all. I’ve watched in bewilderment as others accepted their creations as simply better than nothing. But I never watched how much they grew from such a liberation.
Mediocrity is inevitable and I have spent so many months fighting against this notion only to discard all my attempts and produce nothing at all.
In the world of creativity, spending so much time only to come up with nothing is the true definition of mediocrity.
My sister loves to keep everything that she has ever done, which the exact opposite of my ruthless erasing and deleting. I was cleaning out her desk last week and I stumbled upon her drawings from preschool. A colorful expanse of scribbles and swirls in crayon. It was mediocre in my judgment, but it was a beautiful mess regardless. It was a beautiful mess that a four-year-old once found worthy of pride and inspiration.
“Better than nothing” is the foundation of everything. For we write not to win against mediocrity, but to defeat the unsettling emptiness of nothing.
After all, the emptiness of page endures long past the flimsy label of “mediocre”. The final indictment is the trash can overflowing with crossed out paragraphs that could have been so much more. The collapsed bridge and the bleeding body from the sky get to have the last word.
A Challenge Accepted
I have never gotten away with finishing a writing challenge before. My inner conflict with settling for something less than my own ridiculous standards drives me to quit before the week is over. This internal conflict is exhausting on its own and I sacrifice so many ideas that could have been so much more than paper shreds.
Many nights I can’t bring myself to fish around the recycling bin and find a discarded idea to revitalize. Many nights I surrender to the blank screen because there are “no more good ideas”, but in reality, I’m just avoiding my unfinished ideas and playing it safe.
But playing it safe has proved to be a costly thing on my behalf, for it drinks up time ruthlessly. And I can’t afford to waste any more time.
