3 blah tidbits

First, a true sincere request

I’ve got three small snippets of writing, just to keep things flowing. But, before that two sincere requests for folks I’m closer with that read this.

1. If you’d like to read a completed short story I’ve written and give me earnest feedback on it, I’d love to hear it. I’m trying to get it published and having no luck so need to take another approach.

2. If you’ve got something that’s been consuming you lately you want to post about for the hell of it, I’d love to guest post some of my friends’ thoughts.

If that relates to you, you should know how to get in contact with me (text, email, DM on bluesky). If you don’t know how to get in contact with me drop a comment and I can be in touch!

Internal systems

In Martyr! I read, “You write poems, so you’re a poet.” and want to believe that, but I’m not sure I can. To me, a writer isn’t something you are it’s something someone deems you. You get published, you get credibility, therefore you are a writer.

Alone in the car I listen to A Man/Me/Then Jim and get teary eyed. I keep obsessing over pointless things like what my past friends and partners thought about me or whether or not I’ll ever get a short story published.

My therapist asks me to chart my identity and dissect the different parts of myself to understand their impact and origins. There’s a name for this theory, Internal Family Systems, which he emphasizes, does not mean you’ve got multiple personalities or dissociative identity.

I enjoy the metaphor and, in some ways, I suppose it is a replacement for my lack of faith. After all, I am in a constant search for my “core aspect” my “self…your true essence…characterized by qualities such as curiosity, compassion, wisdom, and calmness.”

Fire Pt. X

I’ve always been like that, though I’m not sure why. Afraid of the world; as if it could reject me, tossing me into its void. K could always pick it apart, even if he never said it outright. We’d be sitting somewhere public, me chewing at the edges of my fingernails, picking at my face, and him watching intensely. It made me angry: the ease at which he picked me apart. I built my identity carefully, constructing each part of myself with perfect precision, hiding those that no longer suited me and then he came in and crashed the whole thing like a house of cards.

The want-to-be-writer

When he read books he marveled at how each passage was constructed. He couldn’t understand how they worked, even after spending hours studying them. He tried reconstruction each sentence: diagraming their structuring and studying their phonetics. He chartered the story structure, marking the highs and lows with a thick black dry erase marker—a trick he learned from a Kurt Vonnegut video.

Still it never worked. He got stuck in the middle, wondering where his characters should go next. They always just stood there looking around, struggling to decide which path they’d choose. It’s like he could see them up till a certain point and then they’d escape his view, disappearing into a dense fog. He thought it must be marvelous to see something fully, to understand an ending before it ever happened.