Not a dedication

So concerning a bit in the whole "You want to date a writer" thing......Specifically the bit that says "Writers will write about you: You don't want this. Trust me."

That's true. That's way true. New friends of mine (far and infrequent these days, oh yay hermited life) sometimes ask me to write about them. Or they'll ask if I've written about them.

And the truth of the matter is it's never as flattering as they think. I generally journal-write and I don't hold anything back. So there I put all of my insecurities about them, any idiosyncrasies I find challenging, and often I question the entire damned friendship. Not necessarily because I don't like them, but because it seems I question every human interaction. Endlessly. Obsessively. To a fault. I'm just that freaking insecure. And it's incongruous for them because verbally, I don't express those thoughts. (It's rude. And awkward. And also just really rude.)

I've had lovers ask for poems about them. The same difficulties present themselves. I don't write love poems (okay, so every poem is a love poem in the sense that it describes some kind of push and pull, but rarely is it emotionally pretty) so what comes out is always strange.

It's totally cliche that writing is more of an act of harnessing words rather than controlling them, but it's also a cliche because it's true. Half the time even I'm surprised by what comes out. I've learned to trust this voice because it gives life to things that I A) don't think about or B) don't WANT to think about. But that's not how non-writers see the whole process.

Writing - or at least journal writing, process writing - isn't a soliloquy. It's not a declaration. It's not a dedication. May Sarton once wrote that writing isn't a way out, it's a way IN. And I've found that to be more true than anything else I've heard about writing.

People think of writing - especially when that writing concerns other people - to be the product of something external. A list. A description. A word picture with lots of pretty adjectives. But that's not what writing is. Not always.

Those closest to me have long since stopped asking me to write about them. They know if they really want to, all they have to do is stop by my Livejournal to see what's going on with how I feel about them.

Luckily - for both myself and them - they rarely do. I appreciate that.