I had a quasi-nervous breakdown today.
Really, it depends on how you look at it, but it seemed as if I knew something was going to go wrong that day. I was agitated and confused, short of breath and I couldn’t concentrate. That’s not an unusual state of being for me these past few months, let me tell you.
The previous week I had put off writing my script because I didn’t think I would have trouble with this topic, having written about it numerous times in the past. Women and their rights.
But when it came down to writing it, I just couldn’t. Up until the last hour when it was still acceptable to submit my script, I was paralyzed with fear. I guess you could say, I had the fear of failing. So, I wrote shit. Perhaps it is because I do not have anything to say at all.
Is it because I have been writing about this subject forever that I couldn’t write anything new about it? A writer is supposed to be able to write about the same thing in different ways. This is my trade and I must write about the same topic, however trite and boring it is for me, in a new and exciting way every single time it is required of me. If I cannot do this, then what am I good for?
One of my greatest fears is realizing that I actually have no talent. That I am nothing but a dilettante, a hack, a big nothing. Someone who will just fade into obscurity, never writing anything brilliant. Like maybe the awards and accolades were a fluke. There was that Writer of the Year Award I got in high school (But then, high school was a tiny pond and not exactly the best measure of my literary abilities and accomplishments). I was quite prepared to die by the time I reached 21 if I still hadn’t written a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, or at least something awesome. That was the sort of pressure I imposed upon myself. I was going to be great or I’m nothing.
But I did end up writing something. It wasn’t exactly noteworthy, but it proved I could at least write. I wrote a screenplay which ended up winning the second prize at national literary contest, and then I wrote that play which was selected for staging–all at the age of 21 (well, I had turned 22 in June, by the time I received the award in August).
I decided–maybe it is my destiny to become a writer. Yes, a writer! I was ready to embark into my new life. So I left my advertising job and went back to school for a Masters Degree in Creative Writing. I was going to teach college kids while writing literature!
It was around this time that I become closer to a friend I met through a film club in school, whom we shall name V and I remember we were walking by the Academic Oval (or insert any other UP locale here) and I told him about my plans of becoming a writer for a living. The award just proved I could make it as a writer, and he said, “A P—- winner? Check it out. There are about 20 guys in my dorm with awards from that contest” in this ‘whoa…big, frickin’ deal’ voice. These kids wrote poetry deemed by the academe as having literary merit and yet, they were, well, losers. Poetry is not exactly a commodity in this country. Not that V wasn’t proud of me re: my accomplishment. He was first and foremost a pragmatist. This guy has a Ph.D. on tough love, as S would attest. See, he only meant that if I wanted to stand out, I had to do something more. Other 20-somethings in my field have done more but they were still losers relying on an allowance from mommy. It is a terrible industry–this ‘writing’ thing I wanted to break into.
I pretty much got the same reaction from my Dad. He said, “So you won this thing. What good has it done you?”
Well, OK. For most parents, financial security is the best measure of their children’s success.
My professor in Poetry 1, J. Neil Garcia, once said that my generation is in too much of a hurry to achieve. We want to win awards young. We want to be published young. We are hungry for success. Well, who could blame us? As children growing up, there was that milk commercial featuring young geniuses. There was a very young girl who could paint very well, a boy who knew that the sun was the center of the solar system and a girl who knew the parts of the circulatory system while the rest of us still struggled with our ABC’s.
So, with these models to live up to, it was hard for the rest of us. You are raised thinking that you are special and that you are going to be great someday. So I had to be very good at something, and through this talent I was going to accomplish great things. After all, humans are only valued for their accomplishments, aren’t they? That’s how the world worked. You were only loved for what you have done and what you could do.
But now, it seems as if I can’t do anything anymore. I can’t even muster enough effort to do a half-assed job on my script. Sometimes my boss would call me into her office and say, “You were a writer. You’re supposed to be more creative than this,” before returning my copy.
Note her use of the helping verb “WERE,” as if my persona–the novelist, the playwright, the screenwriter–had died.
Now, my plaque for the screenplay I wrote when I was 21 hangs in our living room like an accusation. I had not written anything worthy of an award since then. Prof. Butch Dalisay called it the sophomore’s curse. It’s painful because when I went up the stage to receive that plaque, he shook my hand and he said, “Maganda ang ginawa mo.” (What you wrote was good.) In the years immediately after that when I recalled this moment, I was inspired to write some more if only to have a literary great’s approval. But now, I just wonder, where did all the promise go? I was supposed to be a young writer just about to write my masterpiece but I had written nothing.
Sometimes I wonder if I hadn’t made a mistake in my freshman year, when I decided to drop Chemical Engineering to take up Journalism instead…