I hate my boyfriend

I keep waiting for my environment, circumstance or personality to change, to catapult me into a place where I’m writing without effort, without blocks and insecurities and excuses. But none of these things change and I’m left being the same person, in Seattle, Mexico or Nogales, wanting desperately to write and failing miserably. I’m almost thirty, eight days shy to be exact and I feel like a failure. My boyfriend, a self-admitted know-nothing about writing and literature, writes without seeming regard or concern for what others think or how perfect his writing might or might not be initially. And for this I secretly hate him. My jealousy over his pages and pages of cramped little writing that flows from countless notebooks littered across our apartment consumes me. Those little notebooks are like mocking apparitions. In my daily sweep of the apartment, as I’m picking up all his discarded belongings I find these notebooks and they taunt me as I catch glimpses of well turned phrases and the beginnings of complex thoughts scribbled across the page. My exasperation increases as each little phrase floats up to me and I realize that he’s such a newcomer to this writing thing. I wanted to be a writer for as long as I could remember. I dreamt of my first novel, my first publication, and my first book tour. When I was imaging my fame, my audience, he was playing football and like every other high school boy doing everything possible to avoid reading the required texts in his English classes. While I was choosing to read The Sound and the Fury as my independent reading choice in my honors English class he was reading Lord of the Flies along with every other high schooler in the country.

And this is where I realize what’s wrong with me. This is where I realize why I’m so stuck and how I’m doomed to be stuck for life. I take it too seriously. While he shows irreverence for those of us that put so much stock in our English Literature educations, our refined taste and our personal libraries of English classics, while he mocks me with nicknames like, “English” and pokes fun at my aversion to reading John Grisham, he’s writing without pause and writing well. It’s what I lack, that disregard and irreverence that I so need. So rather than secretly competing with him on how many pages he’s written, or how many completed works he’s accomplished, I should be competing with him on the contest of who can be most irreverent. The fact that I’m writing a diatribe about it, however, proves the real winner.