| Lately, I've been doing a lot of stock-taking about where I am compared to where I always imagined I'd be. This is a little unnerving because the years since graduation have been marked mainly by a nebulous lack of any real interest in the "goals," "dreams," "plans" that made up so much of my self when I was in school.I always pictured myself, wherever I was, whatever I was doing, "writing something." Maybe poems on park benches in big cities like Boston or London; maybe snippets of an emerging novel on stolen legal pads during my lunch break at some unspecified publishing house. But writing, something, and constantly, the way it always was when I was younger. Stories, and their accompanying extremely real-to-me characters, followed me throughout the day once. Now I haven't written anything of any real note since I graduated three years ago--and even the things I was writing then had sounded trite and forced for some time.And it leaves me with less of a sense of regret than it used to (or than it ought to). That, I think, is what really bothers me now. Not the fact that I haven't written, but the fact that I've gotten used to the not writing, and that I am eerily not all... |
