I have recently discovered I know nothing about writing. I didn’t read enough as a kid and I don’t read enough now. Just this past week, I skimmed my copy of “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion which I have owned for 5 years. The only reason I had the energy was that I needed to submit a memoir review for class. The same class I sit in where my teacher says names of authors I should know, or have some vague recollection of, but I don’t. It’s easy to feel dumb and turn that into I am a piece of shit who will never amount to anything, how could I even come close to being a writer? But it is pertinent we do not fall down that rabbit hole, especially in today’s society where there’s a new Netflix original mini-series released every day, a slurry of movies on every streaming service, new music bombarding Spotify, and every book since the first book was published in the 14th century is available at our fingertips. There is simply too much information for any single individual to ever know all of it, which is wildly exciting and deeply depressing all at the same time but I’ll let you think about that on your own.
Anyway, back to “The Year of Magical Thinking” I lied. When I bought it five years ago in a Barnes and Noble with the stench of coffee beans in my nostrils, I read 20 pages or so. I hated it. Mind you, I had read Didion’s essays, I was buying it because I liked her, not for the sole reason I wanted to look cool while buying it, but I couldn’t stand it. Over the past 5 years every time I looked at it I was embarrassed, I didn’t like Joan Didion, what was wrong with me? Not even 5 minutes into reading it this time around and I was sobbing, there were tears on my forehead, in my hair, drizzled on my sweater. I was amazed at her ability to be so honest and to describe things as they were not as she wished they were. The coldness of her writing that I perceived as “boring” before, became this extremely disciplined writing that painted a picture without romanticizing it- it was warm and real and raw. There’s this beautiful passage in the book about the last birthday present her husband gave her. He read her book to her. When he finished the passage he looked at her and said never tell me you’re a bad writer again. He gave her the gift of believing in herself.
Maybe it’s because I recently looked over my entire collection of poems, or because they all got ripped apart by a professor, or because I don’t like the way my mind forces words together anymore, but I hated every single poem. I sat on the bench outside of Doti and thought about how incredibly stupid I am. How I must have been the world’s most naive person. I had never read “Year of Magical Thinking” and there I was hell-bent on being a writer. I didn’t have some epiphany on that bench and it didn’t all click with me when I finished that book, no I am having a rather slow realization. That I don’t know shit, I haven’t seen enough movies or read enough books or been enough places, but that also means I am not capable of judging my work. That I could have written the Mona Lisa of poems and not known it. I have made the very simple decision to stop obsessing over my work and absorb more of others because I don’t know shit but I’m trying to and that's what makes it okay.