Everything is Garbage

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash

At least that’s what I kept telling myself.

Everything I write is garbage. It’s trash. Awful. And you want to be a writer?

I do. I always have. Since I was a little girl, I’ve loved writing. I loved imagining trapdoors and hidden rooms and secret gardens. My childhood best friend and I used to go hunting for the witches we knew lived in her grandmother's apartment complex; I took the movie The Witches as gospel. I wanted to live in a world where witches had purple eyes and couldn’t wear cute shoes because they had no toes, one with rooms behind hidden panels, and of course, owls who delivered letters.

Wanting to live in those worlds meant writing them. Recently I came across a notebook from when I was 16. In the notebook was a story I’d started writing before I became crippled by the thought that everything I did was garbage. I remember working on it so clearly, in a weird little damp armchair in the room the sixth formers hung out in. I remember being so excited about it and being convinced I’d publish a series of five books. Cut to 30-year-old me who had barely written for the better part of ten years. What the hell happened?

Several years of working in content for one.

I stopped seeing words as magic but as minions that I needed to force into my Word docs day in, day out. I thought of SEO instead of story ideas. Years of having to churn out large amounts of ‘content’ per day, per week, separated me from my love of writing. I began to hate it, dread opening my laptop on a daily basis, and wouldn’t even contemplate writing for fun anymore. I couldn’t separate the content I was producing from the writing that I loved; everything merged into one miserable tangle. And losing my love of writing made me question whether I was ever any good to begin with. Had I spent years of my life being delusional about my abilities? When I did try to write, it was painful, and it sucked. That made me feel worse and shy away from it even more, creating a nasty cycle of feeling bad because I no longer had the drive to write, feeling like that invalidated me ever loving it in the first place, and wondering if I could even do the damn thing at all.

My mental health was another barrier. I’ve always had some undiagnosed, untreated issues that reared their heads up in intense spurts or long periods of sadness. It took a turn for the worse during the pandemic and I found myself completely paralysed. Depression made it hard to want to want to do anything. I did try. I bribed myself with baked goods to sit down regularly and work on a story that had been percolating in the back of my mind since 2016 and had started calling to me again. Thirty-thousand words in and I was overwhelmed with doubt and frustration, and I couldn’t pull myself out of it. I gave up. I fell apart for a little and landed in pieces at the bottom of a dark crevasse. Then I’d had enough and finally got professional help.

After months of internal work, I started writing again. Slowly. I was determined to just finish something, it didn’t matter if it was good or not, it just needed to be done. I finished a short story that I was proud of. Then, another idea began gnawing at me and I decided to really buckle down and learn how to get that idea to the next phase. I listened to books on plotting and outlining (I am not at all a natural outliner) and bit by bit started building on the idea. In the meantime, at the urging of a good friend, I applied last minute for a fellowship for emerging writers in the Caribbean. The application closed on October 31, Halloween, my favourite time of the year. I went on to finish my first draft two months after applying. When I put my computer aside, I said to the universe (or maybe just to the ceiling fan) ‘Let me win this fellowship and I’ll take it as a sign that I should keep trying’.

I got the fellowship.

In the months since then, I’ve been learning to embrace that things suck quite often, and you have to keep pushing to make them better. Some garbage is okay; it’s good in fact! It’s part of the process. That was a lesson I needed to learn, and learning it, along with addressing my depression, made a world of difference. I’m on the second draft of my story now, and there are many days where I lament how crappy it is and wonder if I can do it. The difference now is, I’ll keep working on it, damn it. I can fix things. I can learn. It is a craft that you can get better at. There are days you won’t want to write, and there are days your concentration is non-existent, but there are the days where you see progress and that’s what matters.

Get familiar with the awful and keep going. Everything is garbage but it’s up to me to believe that I can turn it into treasure.

I know the odds of being traditionally published are terrible, but it doesn’t matter, I’ll still keep trying.