Into the void...

2004-05-21

11:26 a.m.

I haven’t been this emotionally torn up about something since I was an undergrad. Last night, I went to my Dennis Lehane class to workshop one of my more recent stories.

It went badly.

To say it went badly is not quite doing it justice. This is the second time he’s had to pull me aside after class to tell me that he knows I have talent, but my story sucked ass.

You know, if he’d just hand me the damn story with the grade on it, I’d take it and walk away. That would probably be better than being pulled aside at the end of class for him to try and justify himself to me. When he writes things to me about how I appear to have “contempt for the craft” of writing, what the hell am I supposed to think?

Contempt?

Anyone who’s read any of my journals knows that I have anything BUT contempt for literature. I have contempt for a lot of other things, but not literature. And how do you decide something like that, anyway?

I mean, Jesus Christ.

I got home from class last night around 10pm. I almost broke into tears on the bus on the way home, then two or three more times before I could get my ass up off the couch to get ready for bed. Rob tried very hard to calm me down, and it certainly helped to an extent, but not enough.

At three in the morning, I woke up with “contempt for the craft . . . contempt for the craft” running through my head like an obsessive voice telling me to kill people. I can’t shake it. Everywhere I turn, everywhere I think, I hear, I see “contempt for the craft.”

UGH.

Rob had a good point about all the greatest writers having numerous writings that are absolute shit. So, I’m allowed to have a crappy story. It probably was crappy. I don’t fucking know. All I know right now is that I woke up at three in the morning unable to fall back asleep because his voice is playing on repeat in my head: “contempt for the craft . . . contempt for the craft.”

Rob was offered a new job yesterday for about $8,000 a year more than what he’s making now, and I couldn’t even be happy for him last night. I tried really damn hard, too, but Dennis Lehane thinks I’m a terrible writer.

Life is now meaningless.

And the most horrible part of it is that this whole experience is bringing back everything I hated about the undergraduate experience I had with music. Everything I was told, I did. And now it hurts to sing. I had a $120,000 education from a school that taught me to harm my voice and lose my love of music.

You know, fuck the world.

If I wanted to feel lousy about myself, I’d spend all day eating Twinkies and staring in a mirror. The whole point of singing was to love my life. It failed. I failed. The whole point of writing is to love something about my life. That, too, appears to be failing.

Love hurts, right?

And aside from the whole last night’s class experience, I’m stressed to all hell because Rob and I are now planning to move in less than a month. We were not planning on moving till September, but we accidentally fell in love with a place, and now we’re moving June 15th. I am not ready to move. I am stressed out about the move. I will be in Vermont for my cousin’s wedding the entire weekend before the Tuesday that we move.

I can’t take it. It’s too much stress.

Add to that a job I can’t stand going to everyday because it’s a waste of my time and energy just like I consider everything other than my writing, which it now appears is also a waste of time.

Contempt for the craft, my ass.

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