I had enough of it.
Playing carelessly with the darkness and it could consume you into an abyss you can’t escape from. I had enough of it. Enough of the voices. I could see them scrawled out across the walls of my inner psyche. Enough of the images. I could hear them as if a movie projector was running in the back of my head. The whole visual moving image thing would become a problem but more on that later.
Then Haley Pham appeared.
She seemed happy. Jolly, even. Here she was, talking about writing her first novel, and I was looking for some evidence of an inward struggle. Where was the introspection? Where was the mental sacrifice? Writing felt like war to me. I expected something like a writer’s thousand-yard stare. Some indication that the work had taken something out of her.
But she was smiling. C’mon, man. How are you this happy? I had turned on YouTube because I’d had enough of the people in my own head, and now somebody was making the business of creating them look like a good time. I thought about an aspiring writer watching this. What picture of the work were they getting?
Why did her happiness bother me?
And what picture was I giving myself? The serious writer, descending into the darkness of the human soul and coming back wounded by what he had witnessed. That’s a hell of a flattering description of a man sitting at a keyboard.
Maybe I was telling myself a grand noble lie. Perhaps by describing my pain I convinced myself that I had encountered something I was also complicit in which might be a patriarchal logic (the silence that sustains it included). I could write my character James. What disturbed me was the possibility that some of the thought processes behind his actions were already familiar to me.
Invitation and paywall
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