#which isn't even explicity identified in the story

[mewgatori]

Sometimes I put a bit more research into a minor character's name than I really need to

and other times I just go with whatever seems fun because it's a minor character, so I might as well get a bit silly

#ava has a professor who only appears a handful of times #and has a name where both his given and family name were chosen to reference specific people relevant to the college classes he teaches #which isn't even explicity identified in the story #meanwhile Rene has multiple relatives whose names all shorten to Max because I thought it'd be funny #and Lynn has relatives with ''eenie meenie miney mo'' theme naming #which I think I did so that I could justify Moe's weird water theme breaking name #by just going: oh she's just using a different naming theme. it's fine for her to be named Moe #i don't remember my reasoning but I know me better than most people and that seems about right

[placeholder-entity]

I feel like I've got no artistry in my words anymore. In my head the language I speak is a tool for creative expression, like a pen or a musical instrument. But you can't actually draw something without it *being* a drawing, and you can't actually play a note of music without it *being* a note of music. A single blot of paint on an otherwise untouched canvas is a painting. But I feel like I can write as much as I want and it still doesn't become art.

I wrote a few stories in high school, ACTUAL stories with beginnings and middles and endings and things that purported to be characters. Whatever the quality of those pieces, they were art. They fit a definition for written composition that I identify as "art". The thing is, I hate those stories and I hated writing them. I did NOT write them the way I wanted to, I wrote them in accordance with the woefully outdated standards of High Literary Criticism, broadly, and more specifically in imitation of the prose style within "A Seperate Peace" by John Knowles. Even though they were my (debatably) original ideas the content of the art explicating those ideas wasn't original to me in the slightest. I wasn't writing to fulfill a want or a need or a drive or a passion. In the rare instances that I wasn't writing to appeal to my father, I was writing to appeal to a system of criticism that didn't know I existed artistically.

Obviously I stopped writing. That was my entire idea of writing and I got sick of it. I woke up halfway thru my English Bach and realized the only difference between my academic papers and my fiction was the inclusion of original dialouge. My voice had become complete pedantic and unfulfilled. So I stopped. I dropped out of college and I stopped. Stopped writing, stopped reading, stopped thinking about the language as a tool for artistry.

Now I've got nothing

I met a woman just the other day who reads screenplays. That type of person has never been presented to me outside of caricature. That sentence itself reads like the descriptor of a bad Manic Pixie Dream Girl. "Delilah was too high-minded for novels; she interpreted screenplays. It was much more open, she said, because the scene directions left so much to the imagination of the actors and thus to anyone reading it. That made it a challenge as much as a pastime."

But she does, and she does so for a valid reason, dragging her from the world of caricature into our reality by force of sendibility and reason, which stands in direct opposition to idyllicism and quirkiness . She reads screenplays because she wants to direct, and in her own words "if I read enough of them I'll internalize the formatting and structure and best practices." Which I think we can all agree is basically how scholars and creative have mastered their fields ever since their spheres were formalized.

That could have been me. I could have been intelligent enough to *stop reading stuff I hated and regurgitating it* but that literally never occurred to me. Ever. That's why I quit, I didn't have the fucking sense to stop performing the activity in a way that made it joyless. Or more actively, I lacked the imagination to perform the activity joyously.

Now I can't justify the expenditure of my time or my mental health on the activity. The unmedicated anxiety and unresolved trauma combines into a hateful doppelganger that hounds me to commit self harm. I can't argue with it, because it's not a schizoid entity, it's just my genuine desire to harm myself personified, and lacking the tools to resolve and pacify it I've been drowning it out these last 12 years. And the only way to keep it from speaking is to engage enough of my brain that there isn't any power left over for *conscious thought*. Any ability to reflect or ponder my own thoughts results in a violent urge for self harm.

So unless I can craft a perfect story in one go without the need to pause or look back, I can't even write one sentence. The interruption of creative flow to look back and edit gives the doppelganger enough cognizance over the situation to fight me, and it always wins. And frankly I don't value *any* art enough to fight the urge to self harm just to experience it, I really and truly don't. I would much rather continue living in stagnation that spend any more time fighting the urge to self harm than I already do. It might make me fat and miserable and slovenly, but that to me is better than fighting the urge to self harm JUST so I can write a fucking story. I would far rather spend the energy fighting it when I need to go out with friends. Going out with friends is important to me, for a variety of reasons, and committing to that activity also triggers the doppelganger. I don't want to waste vital energy i need for my friends on fucking *art*. Interaction with my friends might eventually trigger a social scenario where I gain a significant other or partner. What the fuck is *art* ever going to net me?

And now this is all I can do. Whine. Regurgitate *these* sentiments over and over again like a computer with a stupidly limited data set to iterate on. This is all I can do without the doppelganger showing up. It works its way into everything. I can set up the most fantastical scene I like and it will write itself in and assault me. This little bubble of misery and regret is all I can create. I'm guessing that's what it wants