Yep.
Mrs. Klukach grade 7.
It’s not really her fault, not really. I always wanted to be a writer.
I won an award that year for a collection of short stories, horror stories. She was the one who submitted it. It was a really big award. I was an all Canadian finalist, I think. Not bad for a pre-teen kid in a tiny village.
I was a weird kid man, I read It by Stephen King 2 years before (I was 10, bad idea) and although I still have nightmares about it and it brought back my dormant stutter for a while, it changed me. It made me want to write. So really it’s Stephen King’s fault.
I was 12 and I think I came in 3rd in all of Ontario. My memory is a bit fuzzy, it was 34 years ago after all. I remember the basic layout of the classroom, I remember where I sat, second row from the door, 4 seats back. We could see trees out the window, I had a purple pen that smelled like grape bubblegum and I won a writing award. I don’t think my parents really cared that much, but like I said, those memories are muddy.
I saw Mrs. Klukach the summer after grade 9, she came to see me on purpose to ask me what the fuck happened to me. Second time ever I had heard a teacher swear I think and it jolted me. I was such a good student, I had such potential etc. and I was failing, badly. She was visibly upset, and I didn’t understand why she cared about the nothing that was me. I don’t remember the answers I gave her, but I am still that girl, standing in the driveway of the house my parents rented while our other house was getting built. Feeling intense shame about letting down an adult who believed in me so much that she came to my house to try and stop my self-destruction. I couldn’t figure out why I mattered to her, but it seems as though I did.
That book I wrote got thrown in the fire after we moved, and I didn’t write another word for years. I ran away and dropped out of school shortly thereafter.
So at least this is my excuse for the last 10 months but how about the 396 months between getting that award or the 372 months between her and the driveway and March 13th 2020 when the world shut down.
In no way in my entire life have I ever lived up to my potential.
Law of averages states I am a little over halfway through this particular lifetime. Maybe another 396 months if I am lucky. Probably less if my heart breaks.
I could run through the gambit of excuses for why I am the way I am. I have a deformity, I left home at a young age, I had a child young, I never really felt supported, had testing been around when I was school aged I might have been diagnosed ADHD or something like it. I struggled financially my whole life really until I turned 39 and dumped the last of the leeching boyfriends. I could lay the blame at the feet of literally all of my exes if I wanted to. From the one who knocked me up, to the ones who took advantage of me stripping and virtually pimped me out and wrung me dry. To the ones who weren’t ‘readers’ and couldn’t figure out why I wanted to spend half my days with my face in a notebook or my laptop and thieved my time making their supper or washing their dirty drawers.
But it’s really no one’s fault.
Lots of people who had it worse than me made something of themselves. And here I sit, on borrowed time in an overpriced Airbnb talking to you fine folks about how I wasted my life. And all of it boils down to my choices.
I wanted to be loved so badly that it encompassed my life, all of it. I searched and settled and searched again, and in between I survived. Never really thriving.
I am writing yet another book, at least I am stubborn about one thing, it’s quite good, little rambling in bits, but considering the state of the world as is, and the post-apocalyptic landscape I created in the fantasy world I am writing about, I just want to make sure everyone is crystal clear on why the world ended, greedy men and the alt right christian patriarchy.
Even then, I started it mid-March 2020 and have had all the time in the pandemic world to work on it and I go weeks and months without looking at it. Even this last little trip when I decided this is it, it’s time, I can do this, I have barely done this. 3 weeks and maybe 6000 words. Not even enough for a novella. I am failing.
I couldn’t sleep the night before last, couldn’t eat either, my stomach in knots and my brain spinning. So I didn’t sleep, and I didn’t eat, I just wrote, a few blog posts that will be posted eventually and a few just to take my pain from out of me and into somewhere where it can’t hurt me. And I made some headway on the book. One of the secondary characters is getting his backstory. I wrote the life he wanted instead of the one he chose. It’s the least I can do.
I find it funny too, for a girl who has always pined for love, I still write these powerful, witchy, sassy awesome female characters, loosely based on me, and they always live alone. 2 published works, and it’s still ‘her’ apartment. At least this book I live with other witches, but it’s still my magical house built into a yew tree.
Maybe I am creating my own destiny, both through crippling fear of failure and the resulting inaction and the inability to fucking focus on one thing and through these fantasy worlds I have the gift of creating in my head and sometimes on paper. Writing my destiny to always want something but never have it.
I am thinking too that I may actually have some kind of chemical imbalance that makes it harder for me to focus than your average Joe, plus a little mystical magical karmic interference. And the irrefutable fact that I have honestly never felt good enough, even when one of my favorite teachers was standing in my driveway (verbally) shaking me and telling me that I was.
Before I really started writing again as an adult and just kept a diary of sorts, and scribbled bits of magnetic poetic genius (they were pretty cool snippets really) I wrote 2 things.
As always, she is a prisoner of her ghosts
And
I’m afraid I am scared of my potential.
I threw those diaries and notebooks and collections of other people’s quotes away 4 or 5 moves ago but I still haven’t fully escaped that girl I was, pining for a love that would transform me, trapped by the negativity of myself and others and scared of my potential.
Those two things are just as true in this moment as they were when they appeared on my refrigerator half my life ago, as they were in the driveway of that rental house and I don’t know how to stop it.
Humans tend to take the easy way out. ~W
It’s not like I am even being easy on myself, just hard on myself in all the wrong ways.