Sometimes I read stories written by other people who are obsessed with writing. They feel compelled to do it, they stress when they don't, they miss it like it's a dog they left behind while they're on vacation or the mother who obsessively checks the baby monitor when she's walking down the driveway to get the mail. They feel taken by it, kidnapped and in love with their captors, they are gloriously in love with the process of creating.

I am not like that. When I try to journal in my online diary, I enter middle school-esque lists of what I did during the day; tedious, boring and mind-numbing recollections that fail to capture any of the things that made my day truly stand out. I find myself writing the same sentences over and over again, and looking back at my work pains me. I am not obsessed with writing. I wouldn't say I am addicted to it in the way that some people do; like it's a high they continually chase and feel satisfied by. I think I'm addicted to writing in the way someone might be addicted to heroin. The pleasure has long worn off, and now I only write so that I can avoid the pain that might come when I don't do it. But it doesn't give me any pleasure. It doesn't delight me, and I don't find myself inspired by the things I write. I put off writing to the very end of my day because, frankly, I can't be bothered with the process itself. What I miss, what I yearn for, and what I chase after within writing is something that exists outside it. It's the idea, the sweet and precious idea, of being a writer that appeals to me.

Like a businessman staring wistfully at the moon, remembering a long-forgotten dream of being an astronaut, I cling to writing because I don't want to face my fear that I am a boring person with nothing to say. The older I get and the more confident I become in myself in other areas of my life such as my day job, my relationships, my lack of a relationship with my father (typical), I lose confidence in this one. When I was 17 I won third place in a national contest, and my novel was published in a small print run that did moderately well. I tasted creative success too early, when I didn't appreciate it, and now at thirty-one I feel stale and outdated, ignored at the literary parties I make up in my own head. The other day I got really excited about a book idea I had come up with, about a couple made up of a rather conservative man and his retired sex worker girlfriend, whose relationship is rocked to the core when she's offered a million dollars to sleep with an old client of hers. I started scheming and planning it out when I was talking to a client who casually said, "oh, isn't there a movie already about that?" I immediately hated him and knew it must be true without even looking it up. When I did have the nerve to look it up later, it was all there, my idea for a book that had already been in print for decades. It was a week before I started to write again, pushing my giant stone up the hill and wishing I had picked a different vice, any other vice.

I think, though, my enjoyment of writing waned in graduate school. I hated my MFA program, which was really a joke couched as a fun study abroad opportunity, wrapped in debt. And I hated even more my PhD program, which was the first time I had ever hit an intellectual glass ceiling and thought to myself, "I'm not smart enough to do this." The only other time I've felt this way is when an ex-partner of mine would yell at me when he was drunk, telling me I was dumb. When he was sober, he would tell me that I was the smartest girl he'd ever met. Not person, mind you, just girl. When you have a body that fits conventional standards for attractiveness, men will compliment you all the time, hoping for freebies. Because these compliments are always said with alternative intentions in mind, I shy away from them. I don't believe them. I willfully and scornfully deny them to the point of rage. I hate when a man compliments my intellect, because mostly what he means to say is, "you're hot, and it's surprising that someone as hot as you can have a brain as well." As a result, I've noticed that I've purposefully dumbed myself down to avoid the compliments and the attention, and worst of all, the surprise. Men are more comfortable around me when I pretend to be an idiot. Maybe that's a part of it too, was that it started to become a comfortable and lazy skin I wore, a mental set of sweatpants that slowly became my daily wardrobe. When I am stupid, I am not threatening, and when I am not threatening, men give me things. I told myself this was my way of beating the system, but I think this is just my way of letting the system beat me without getting too bruised in the process.

I don’t have a lover’s passion for writing, or even a Stockholm syndrome relationship to writing. I have the tired habit of reaching for a cigarette that I feel is bad for me, and yet I still need it to get through my day. So keep me accountable, folks. Keep me present and here.