It is not about the number of pages; or poems; or posts that you write.
It is not about the creative process or what you did to get there.
And it is not about the feelings you are trying to expel or how misplaced you are to begin with.
It comes down to the number of retweets. Or reblogs. To the number of people who tumbled down a internet web and wound up at your page. And the number of people who kept looking once they got there.
Your success can best be measured by how many young mainstream girls quote you on Instagram.
And unlike great authors before us, who only became great after their death.. we will not have this ritual.
Once we die no one will take our crumpled papers from our desks and decipher them. No one will search through our notebooks; looking for sonnets to recite for centuries after.
We will die with our phones held close. Our texts will expire, our cellphone numbers will be recycled.
Every blog we have will be sent further down the black hole of the internet until google no longer recognizes our user name.
To be a writer is to dedicate yourself to the idea of being invisible. You must have to prepare yourself for living in a clock. Every key stroke you make on your Mac is equivalent to just a fraction of a chance. A chance for you to have a physical printed book.
A physical printed book. Not to be confused with a published book. Please remember one you pay for and the other pays you.
Being a writer is being sad. Not sad enough that people want to put you in a pillowy white room, but just sad enough to remind everyone else that they are not robots... and life sucks.
Life doesn't suck because it's short or because it has restrictions, but the feeling of life can be explained by that same deflating feeling you experience as a young child when you outgrow your favorite shoes or pants or when your favorite shirt gets a hole.
That feeling of giving everything, wanting everything, yet getting nothing.
The epitome of being a writer.
