I, in my corner, with my monstrous needs

I have always been cautious, hesitant, accusatory, even, about the reality that all my art is derivative of pre-existing creations. A lot of my writing is reminiscent of life experiences and attempting to articulate my feelings, but a lot of it is also inspired by the media I consume, quotes from the greats, and established pieces that have already seen success. I continue to question myself, at what point does inspiration become plagiarism? Am I already on the precipice of losing originality? Even when I detail personal accounts or try to explain complex emotions, my words are always bracketed with metaphors, and at one point, does that null the context of what I am attempting to say? When I can’t even properly describe something without the crutch of something else that already exists? Descriptor terms escape me, and I am piecing together snippets and excerpts of things that already exist, even if they are as simple as a single letter, and I wonder, is this piece even my own anymore? Or is it a collage of other voices that I try to emulate as my own?

It's quite difficult to say when it comes to writing because there is a chance that everything I say and everything I want to say may have already been said. It would be damn near impossible to read everything that has ever been written in the temporal range of human history. But I’ve exhausted that topic enough, and in this instance, it is a moot point. What I’m trying to say here is that I fear that I am constantly trying to imitate a voice that is not mine, trying to pass it off as my own. Don’t get me wrong, though. It is not out of disrespect. I am enthralled by the addictive rhetoric of Jessa Hastings, a modern-day narrator whose stories I can’t seem to entangle myself out of. I am hypnotized by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s rhythmic prose. Though he is not a poet by definition, find any excerpt from his texts, and his words roll off your tongue like lyrics. I envy John Green’s ability to create so effortlessly, crafting some of the most profound sentences in simple terms in the middle of an essay about Dr Pepper.

I want to be all of them at once, and I also want to find my own voice. I wish I could extract odds and ends from my favorite writers and inject their talent into what I make, but what would that create? Paragraphs of falsities strung together by an impostor. I have yet to find the balance of simply holding inspiration in my heart but letting my brain do the speaking. I do not want someone to read what I write and find a likeness to Ocean Vuong or Toni Morrison. (Though if someone did without my intended purpose for them to reach that conclusion, I think that would be the highest honor ever received.) I want people to identify my own distinct voice in between the lines; I want them to be able to pinpoint the narrator as me, something as direct and easy as pointing to your hometown on a map. I’m scared that after all this time, I have not even come close to developing this modernity that I seek.

This fear has begun permeating in many other facets of my life. My algorithm on social media has played a big hand in me finding books to pick up, but with those recommendations also come outside opinions. As I finish each novel, I have found myself swayed by these already-formed opinions influencing my half-baked ones, and sometimes it’s like I don’t even have a specific thought to give about what I just read, solely relying on conclusions other people have pulled from the text. I dub myself a so-called reader, but my declining ability to accurately890 process my feelings and opinions on what I have just read really just labels me a fraud. I am practicing resistance, but when our lives are now inundated with third-party assumptions, my words and ideas are buried beneath layers and layers of already concluded discourse.

This begs the question, what do I even like? What am I passionate about? What media do I actually enjoy consuming, and how can I begin to dissect these concepts critically? How many of my hobbies have been influenced by what’s trending online, what’s deemed cool right now? I know with certainty that I picked up reading five years ago as a result of boredom, but are the books I rate the highest truly the ones I enjoy the most? What even defines a good book? People are talking too much about everything, about the things that do not need to be discussed to this extent. We are speaking over each other, and what once was productive conversations have now become a humdrum of noise, and no one is willing to listen to each other.

I am trying to separate my voice from the others, allowing myself to listen to those who speak with clarity and finality in their ideas, but practicing discipline in my threshold of absorption. I am making a concerted effort to find nuance in arguments, that opinions are not always black and white. This grey area is where I am attempting to explore; this is where I must live creatively. I am becoming a blank slate, allowing my inspirations to prop me up like an easel, but where my pen meets paper, there is nothing yet. This is where I begin.