Jealousy and Second-Hand Stories

I was thirteen when I decided that I wanted to spend the rest of my life writing stories. Everyone told me that it was too young to know for sure what you wanted to do with the other 50-60 years of living. Up until about 2-3 years ago, I really thought that I was the one in the right. I knew what I wanted and life was simple and I wrote everyday for hours and hours and I had everything figured out. But that was then. In the fall of 2007 I became an International Peer Advisor for the Asia University America Program, where I worked with a lot of Japanese students. Then I went to Japan. The whole time my mind was occupied with which conjugation is best for the emotion I was trying to express or my lesson plans for teaching English.

I started to think that if I stopped writing, it wouldn’t kill me. I might not even miss it. But I kept pursuing the Creative Writing major in order to just graduate sooner and get back to Japan. Somewhere in between the past progressive conditional form of “to sleep” and learning how to make my own character lunch box with heart shaped rice and eggs with faces on them, I lost my ideas. They slipped away while I was sleeping and I dreamed them away like you sweat away water. I not-so-modestly believe that I can still turn a phrase and come up with a decent metaphor, but I can’t think of a story that’s mine.

I have now finished reading all of Alan’s posts and I was jealous. Sincerely jealous. It seems like all the runaway ideas, not necessarily mine but all of the other ideas running around loose, have crawled up into Alan’s brain through his ear and laid to rest there before hatching into wonderful ideas that he puts into stories.

I am not sure where to go from here or how to make the ideas I shoved down and forced away return. I’m not sure if me still being a writer is a possibility anymore. I’m a 23 year old English major with a love for reading and no originality. I think if you dissected anything I’ve written within the last 2 years, you’d find that I spent the better part of all my writing just rearranging or latching on to other better writers’ words.

I’m very sure that my creativity has died of natural causes. Not quite sure that’s it’s reversible…