Letting Myself in Between the Lines

As a creative youth, I often thought about ways of telling stories in new and unexpected ways. Yet, what emerged from my fingertips was often dry and totally devoid of personality. What went wrong? I didn’t let myself in between the lines. 

For so long, I felt all I’d ever amount to was a prolific article writer rambling on about whatever topics happened to tickle my fancy. I felt focusing too much on including my own self would get in the way of my growing as a writer. 

I soon found my writing archives flooded with informative, but often uninspired articles and half-baked academic pieces with some lines of interest but an underlying feeling of boredom and trivialities. There were also hundreds of poems that often fell just short of being little more than words thrown together because they sounded good to my twisted senses of the time. 

Beyond that, I have a few creative nonfiction pieces perhaps worth publishing in a collection. Then, there’s my fiction work, a disastrous mess all its own. Over the past several years, I’ve been collecting notes on what good ideas I’ve had over time, salvaging whatever I may be able to repurpose. Then, I let go of the scraps, committing them to digital oblivion.

For some time, I’ve felt that many things I’ve posted online meet only the lowest bar of my ridiculously high standards. Most of them I still don’t feel are worth keeping around for others’ to see. Still, I’m remixing, re-imagining, and trying to rectify pieces written at various periods across my life journey.

Unfortunately, so much of what remains to be curated is at the level of many of my high school journals. There’s sometimes material yielding the basis for some individual lines and poetic verses worth quoting. Mostly, I find that my writing has long been an exercise towards not only trying to find not just my identity as a writer, but growing and developing as a sentient being. 

After all these years, I’m still developing my own identity as a writer or even as a human being. Perhaps in the whole collection of my written works, others will discover that identity for me through reading them. Therefore, I continue to write, well unaware what the end result may be.

Related: Do I Have Something Worth Writing? | Should I Take a Break From Writing?