My mom always told me, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, keep your mouth shut.” Well, Mom, it’s a really good thing that writing does require me to open my mouth or else I, just as many other like-minded and overly opinionated people, would be taking a permanent vow of silence. The people I’m referring to are my fellow writers; you know who you are and you also know if we didn’t have putting pen to paper (fingers to keyboard) as an outlet we’d lose our shit, real quick.
We may come off as normal but on the inside, we are anything but. We see grammatical errors everywhere we turn, which makes reading professors’ Powerpoints endlessly frustrating.
We have an opinion on literally everything, and if you don’t like it we’ll tell you to stop reading. (Don’t post a comment and expect to get a rise out of us, because if you do, you’ll regret it).
We don’t see things through rose-colored glasses. Our glasses are red for one reason and one reason only: we drink enough Pinot Noir to keep all of the wineries in Napa, California, afloat for a good while.
There’s an angle to everything and an article idea at the bottom of every glass of wine. I may just be speaking for myself (I don’t think I am), but there’s a lot more to every human behind the keyboard than the articles we write. See, I’m not a writer, per se. If I was, I would be writing the next "War and Peace" or "To Kill A Mockingbird" (RIP Harper Lee). If I was doing that I would have to take myself seriously, and that sounds like a slippery slope into giving a rat’s behind about adult things, and I’m not about that life.
I’m not clever. I can’t spell and I “Google” how to do most things in my daily life (i.e., how to work a french press or I sneezed 14 times in a row, am I dying?).
As non-writers but kind-of-writers, we’re pretty used to failing. Not in the depressing sense of the word but more in the challenging and enraging sense.Writer's block is a very real condition and its symptoms include: loss of sleep, very random and uncalled for activities (i.e., standing on our heads in hopes that an article hook will magically come to us), and awkwardly clean homes (i.e., stress cleaning) due to our inability to get our word vomit down on paper.
We run awayto our writing a lot.
For me, the thought of having a nine to five job makes me want to crawl in a hole, mostly because I have a really unprofessional outlook on the world. (I prefer to call it “lighthearted,” but what the hell do I know?) Being able to lay my fifth-year-college-senior-sarcasm to “rest” before I explode into the “real world" has saved my sanity more than a few times.
Our worlds are the same as everyone else's, but we have the interesting responsibility of putting our vulnerability on paper. It's not always easy (it's rarely easy), but at the end of the day, if we didn't do it, we'd be insane, and ain't nobody got time for that.
