On James Baldwin and how he gets it (and me).

I wrote my first short story this week.

JINKIES!

 Was it good, you ask? No. Not really.

And of course that's okay.

So it's not a very big deal, really. I wrote most of it the night before/ morning it was due.

Just like I do everything, you know?

 So why does it matter so much to me? And why do I do that anyway (write everything the morning of)?

I'll tell you why. 

And James Baldwin will tell you why.

It's because I'm scared scared scared SCARED SCARED.

And this is why:

Of all the things I want and hope and yearn to be (which is a considerable list of things, you have perhaps noticed), a writer, in its most hazy and glamorous depiction, is perhaps what I want most.

 So write, you might say.

Write every day! Write everything. Write poems. Write dumb things. Write brilliant things. Write about people you don't know and people you wish you knew and yourself and weak people and brave people. And I DO. Kind of.

Actually I write all the time.

But I'm so afraid of writing something good (or trying to) because that's what I want more than anything, and if I fail... well then, I fail everything.

So purposefully procrastinated mediocrity is safe. Huh? I've been planning that story for WEEKS.

But I wouldn't let myself write it. SCARED SCARED SCARED. Waiting waiting waiting.

As the brilliant James says,

"I thus gave the world and altogether murderous power over me, but also that in such a self-destroying limbo I could never hope to write.

One writes out of one thing only-- one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give".