My December to Remember 3: Day Two
News: Biden claims he taught at UPenn for four years (again) which didn’t happen.
Videotapes of depositions from Jan 6th Committee investigations have disappeared.
Jussie Smollett ordered back to jail.
I’m a fraud. This is how I feel sometimes. I told this to my co-worker the other day when she asked if I was writing anything lately. No, I had to tell her. I’m just a fraud. I’m a writer? What the hell do I write? I have no book, no screenplay, no story. Just six years of chicken-scratch notes and an unfinished first draft. How dare I call myself a writer. What a phony I am. And I don’t know how to stop it.
When I was going through the myriad papers my mom saved, I found a slew of my old grade school book reports. Some of the books I remember reading, but a lot of them I don’t. And I don’t remember writing them out, either. That’s because my mom was the one pretty much doing it for me. She’d spend all her evening time helping me with my homework as I sat there, bored and uninterested in all these requirements given by my teachers so I could bring home straight A’s and make her happy. She’d tell me what to write a lot of the time, as what I’d come up with wasn’t as compelling. Her and her English degree would always know what to say, and her words were what the teachers were most impressed by. Don’t tell my university, but she even wrote a paper or two for me when I was far too lazy to do it myself. So my degree is partially hers as well, if you want to get technical about it.
But what does this prove? I hated school and doing assignments on things I had no interest in, and never saw this homework as my own anyway. So where does that leave me now? If this is what I want to do forever, shouldn’t I have made some headway on it by now? Or am I putting too much undue pressure here and comparing my story to other peoples’? Is this Imposter Syndrome at play, or am I just too lazy to pursue my dreams? Can I even call myself a writer if this is all there ever will be?
I think what’s happening here is I’m operating on the grandiose notion that I’ve already made it and need not do anything else for my livelihood. But I am simply not there yet. I can tell people I’m a writer, which is true. I do write. My job as a producer requires a lot of writing. But I’m not an author. Not a storyteller. Not a novelist or screenwriter. If there’s one good takeaway here, at least I’m not a liar about it. I won’t tell you I’m something I’m not, even as I transcribe signs showing you one day I will be.
I’d like to tell you there’s a lot of things I’m working on, but there isn’t. I’ve got something in mind, but it has stayed stagnant in my prompts for ages. Really, something here has got to give to get my fingers moving again, so I may actually move the needle and generate a project, rather than record my navel gazing into an endless void of words and letters.
I’ll bet you anything even the great literary artists of our time have questioned their work or ability. Does anyone actually think they’re perfect? Do the known liars know they’re lying? These are things I cannot know. All I can do is keep up my words. Keep letting them out. There’s no one here to tell me what to write. It all just comes from me. Sorry if my schoolwork wasn’t what you thought it was.
