I’m not going to waste your time or mine on pithy excuses.

What matters is, I need to face the real reason why I haven’t been writing.

I’m squirming in my seat, embarrassed to admit this puerile-sounding fact so publicly.

I’m jealous of Violet; specifically, jealous of her amazing writing abilities.

My feelings aren’t exacerbated by anything she’s done.  Violet is consistently encouraging, supportive, and patient.  Unfortunately, this verdant intransigence is entirely my fault, and my problem.

For years, my identity and my art were deeply entangled.  I was the writer. Writing helped propel me through my tumultuous adolescence. Dreams of weaving stories that shaped lives and moved hearts gave me the strength to endure high school.

In college, writing was still my saving grace. I intuitively understood how to bend words into compelling shapes to suit my rhetorical whims. When my friends needed help proofreading their papers, I was the first one they called. I still dreamed of publishing a novel, but I was beginning to understand that hard work and talent alone weren’t enough to realize my fantasy.

Occasionally, I made other things. I hooked yarn and splattered paint. I doodled in pen and ink. I captured moments, feeling, intent with a lens and a few pixels. These creative pursuits were fun, but they felt too playful to rightfully be called art.

Then I fell in love with someone who was also the writer. She had a writing degree and an ubershiny blog. She was asked to write for Punkass! Her fiction accrued more praise than my own ever had.

Instead of rejoicing in our shared passion, I felt threatened, inferior.  I shut down.  I wondered why I should bother to write at all, when Violet’s prose was more robust, more elegant, more supple than my own.

My feelings were, and still are, completely irrational. Why can’t we both be writers? Just because someone else I care about has talent, why should that diminish my own joy in the creative process? If I truly feel that Violet is a better writer, why can’t I shove aside my ego and learn from her?

I am still attempting to prop up my self-esteem with praise about my writing. Although I may have needed an ego crutch to survive in the past, that crutch has become dead weight. I need to let it go.

It would be nice to publish a book. Nice, but unnecessary. Money has a way of sucking the fun out of anything it gets involved in. I don’t want to have to hawk my wares to everyone I meet in order to make a living. Capitalism makes us all into whores, and I’d rather whore my ability to nod sympathetically and make spreadsheets than whore something that really matters to me. Therefore, I need to stop feeling like other artists are a threat, and their successes equate my own failure. Art is not a race, dammit.

Although I still feebly cling to my childhood dream of becoming an authoress, I can feel my emotional attachment to that fantasy transforming into something more rife with possibilities. Scarcity of talent is a fallacy: by surrounding myself with poetesses, painters, photographers, lovers, dreamers, and hookers, I am enriching, not eroding, my artistic self.

I’m pulling my punches and trying not to telegraph my frustration and self-doubt. Why am I so bad at this?

I went to a wedding today. Someone said, “My advice about marriage: You’ll have the same fights over and over again. You should number them so you can skip straight to the forgiveness part.”

Marriage, in this instance, is a handy metaphor for being human. Staging the same conversations with myself in order to vivisect and catalogue the myriad small wages in which I am damaged seems futile and trite. Sadly, I still engage in that sort of unproductive internal dialogue from time to time.

If I love you, I love you always. Please forgive me for my my social transgressions and minor neuroses. I can’t quite bring myself to reach out to anyone just yet but I’m working on it.

2) John Mackey is not Whole Foods.

3) Boycotting Whole Foods wlll hurt lots of people who work there who aren’t John Mackey and who don’t agree with his position on healthcare reform and frankly, think he’s an ass.

Why can’t boundaries be a place to begin the conversation?

Use I statements. Keep telling yourself that nobody else can hurt your feelings unless you let them. The truth is, that only works if you don’t let anyone else in.

Solitude is apt to shed its charms suddenly. I grieve the loss of expectations that were never borne out by anything substantial. Fleeting feelings fold abruptly, leaving an acrid-sweet taste on my tongue.

Was it because you didn’t care? Was it because you cared too much?

Fuck subtlety. I’m sorry I can’t take a hint. Write me a letter. Call me. I’m easy. I’ll be busy abrading my ego but I can make time to rub you the wrong way.

I understand, though I’m not one for ultimatums, that sometimes this is the way things have to be. That may not be what you said, but it was what you fucking meant. Closure might as well be a four-letter word.

Mental tongue twisters and verbal gymnastics can’t flatter me into believing that you want anything to do with me. Stop trying to be polite, already.