ghosts are good company

i can’t imagine what it would be like to live my life without so many artists around me.  sometimes i forget about the art, because it seems like it’s part of breathing for so many of my friends… most of them write and write and write amazing stuff without even having to think about it - or at least that’s what it looks like from this end.  others take pictures, others make physical art.  and crafting!  there’s so much crafting, and that’s an art of its own.

i’ve always been an arts and crafts person, afraid of formal writing - i never have enough original ideas for fiction, and i can’t keep my mind on one track long enough.  somehow, though, i’ve been impressing people without even trying.  i have mentioned this other places before, but three of my teachers this quarter have complimented my writing - two in a “you should try to be published” way and one in a “i’m going to hand out this exam and on the side note that you’re very skilled at writing” way.

this hasn’t happened since my senior year of high school, which leaves me wondering if it’s just a context thing?  both places i’ve been with students who have been told that they’re not so good at school (here at a community college, then at an arts school where we learned about “punctuation, your friends and mine!”), so maybe it’s just the pompousness of my writing style that’s impressing people - that i have been doing this long enough that i can make fun of the form and the structure?  i don’t know.  what i do know is that i wrote a paper last week, the final paper for my transphobia class, and it was awesome.  it wasn’t quite in my normal, scoffing tone (the easiest papers for me to write are the ones where i hate the subject matter), and cubbie noted - and i agree - that it’s somehow more mature than the rest of my work.

the piece gave me a glimpse into a place where i can write from knowledge - because surely an opinion-piece on trans stuff is somewhere i have knowledge.  it makes me look at my procrastination and wonder what my work would look like, if i weren’t always afraid that it was going to avalanche  down on me.

not that i have, you know, any immediate plans to stop procrastinating.  and i’m going to turn that submission that i’m working on for that anthology…  sometime.  i have until the end of the month, anyway..