The stress of being a writer.

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.

The Nightly Ritual

I lay flat on my stomach every night and place my left ear to the pillow. My palms down on the soft sheets, elbows bent at ninety degrees, almost as if I am against a wall being checked by a cop. In a way I am. This ritual is my way of surveying myself at the end of the day.
My eyes stay open because I know if they close my peace of mind will cease to exist. Time passes. As my breathing slows my eyelids flutter and slowly fall. I hear lullabies floating through the air around me and it is at this moment that I remember why I do this. These two to three minutes I spend swaddled in pure nothingness are euphoric enough to make what comes next tolerable. It's when the bubble encasing me from the outside world pops. The sound of a door or a voice outside my window. I am awake but I cannot control my mind. I cannot fully step out of the trance. I cannot keep my blood pressure from rising when I become too aware of myself. Senses heighten when other senses are blocked. No sight, induces a much more sensitive touch. Suddenly the room goes from a dark exoskeleton of walls to just black. As if floating in a sensory deprivation chamber. You have no choice but to feel your body. With my eyes closed I have discovered the lumps of fat hidden under other folds, and I can feel single straggling hairs being moved against the sheets that my mother gave me for Christmas. I become aware of how broad my shoulders are and I feel the knots in my muscles pressing deeper into my back as I place more imaginary weight on it.
It scares me sometimes. The realization that I have become a pack-mule. A slave who is being held to impossible standards, being told to carry monstrous loads, being judged unmercifully.
But the Slave Master is familiar. I get the funny feeling that I am looking into a mirror and that is when I open my eyes.