Hagintha Woods

I dream of being an author.

To be more specific, writing saved my life from myself, and now I’ve pledged said life at it’s altar like a homoerotic knight of old.

To be even more specific, somewhere between being born and breathing through the years, ideas have grown and flowered within my headspace, and I have to spit as many of them out as quickly and artistically as I can to have even the littlest amount of room for passing as an averagely normal human being. (Ask me how long it took to remember the birthday of the partner whose life has been entwined with my own since I was 7. Or what I had for lunch. Actually, don’t ask. I’m not going to answer.)

My life and experiences are filtered and then shared with the medium of words. When I was battling suicidal ideation in my teens, the stories I imagined in my head were a reprieve from the world, food for the soul, and an encouragement to keep going.

I cannot say if they were great, or even adequate, but they gave me a place of intrigue and magic, a space for life to be reflected upon, and they helped me keep breathing- if only to see how the story would end. And if they saved me, if they had even a modicum of the ability to help others in the same way, then I felt like I had a duty to bring what was in my psyche unto the page and out into the world where those who needed it could find it. So I looked myself in the eye and made the decision to postpone death until I was done writing the stories that I needed to share.

To that end, I fell in love with the legend of the struggling artist, tried to cram my writing into the soft, purple hours before daybreak, sneak it into the twilit hours of night. I chose to forego sleep, games, hours of my time to sit and scribble (or type) like a lunatic raving at the moon. It’s a common image, the poor artist intensely committed to their craft, a candle burning at both ends for the sake of passion.

Along the way, however, the ideas grew and multiplied.

From a short story, an idea bloomed into a novel, then stretched into a trilogy. I kept getting character inspirations, settings for more novels, short stories and poems. Acknowledging that this goal was turning into a marathon where I’d mistakenly thought it to be a sprint, I had to switch gears, all whilst swallowing a vague sense of betrayal.

Faced with this shift, I had to look at a life plan that had been a sentence long- write book, then die- and contend with the logistics of the first step taking far longer than anticipated. All of a sudden, I had to think about jobs, a five-year plan, keeping the lights on in a body where they’d been flickering since birth. I scrambled for the closest one I found myself in, and started working to buy myself the time I required.

But then, yet another problem. The job didn’t give me a lot of space nor time to write. I was learning constantly, spending my time outside of work learning more to make up for my inadequacies. I spent a lot more of said time having to stare at the ceiling in silence once I got home before I could feel moderately human again (as is the case with most client facing jobs, I find).

Of course, I still wrote, if anything, out of sheer determination and spite, another tick in the checklist of the struggling artist that I’d heard about so often. I squeezed some words in during breaks, stayed up late, joined writing groups for accountability. I would have months of nothing, then overnight binges of 20k words in a single sitting. I would blink and look up, hands shaking, eyes bleary, not knowing who I was or what time it was supposed to be. My moods veered wildly between the guilt of not having written and the euphoric satisfaction of having finished a chapter.

But both my writing and my body suffered for it.

The word count was mostly the same, and there was the occasional genius buried within the paragraphs, but now as I undertake the process of cataloguing and putting my work in a common place (this blog), some of the pieces are too heavy-handed where they should be gentle, ugly where they should be grotesque, verbose and meandering where simplicity would cut a cleaner, sharper picture.

I can choose to pat myself on the back and say that I am simply a better writer now, or attribute the tweaks I am making to the much needed practice of revision, but I do wonder how some of these pieces would have turned out with a little more space to breathe.

Back then, I treated my writing like illegal contraband, snippets of lines in alleyways, hushed sentences spoken in the dark.

I would like to say that I put my foot down and started searching for ways to change my life, all for a love of the craft. But instead, I trucked on, allowing my writing to limp alongside me, living its’ half-life as I fought to say that I was fine, that I was a real writer. After all, wasn’t I writing in the face of it all? Didn’t all artists face this problem?

I didn’t make a move till years later, when my responsibilities had increased and I turned back and realised it’d been a good year since I’d written anything. It felt like the world’s most unobtrusive bait and switch, where I thought I’d been buying time but then realised that the job had been buying me.

A part of why it took so long to take action was inertia, of course. Change is a fear-inducing thing, even if the current situation isn’t ideal. But when I look back at the way I tackled things, a not so insignificant part of why I’d dragged my feet was due to my familiarity of the struggles and legitimacy of the tortured artist.

The starving artist. I had long associated my dream to endless pain and suffering, and so when the hardships came, I accepted them all unthinkingly, my head bowed- a pliant lamb for the slaughter.

Suffering for my dream had a romantic cast to it, something that would make the recount of my story grittier, more meaningful, when I was telling it. And this is a story echoed by society, not only for art (though it’s exceedingly common there). How much pain can you take for your dream? Will you die for your dream?

As I continue to live, and I continue to write, I have come to view this as reductive, fatalistic and cheap. Death inevitably comes for everyone, so whilst I am making a sacrifice and putting in the effort, it’s not like I could have escaped death anyway. It’s just choosing the manner in which my flame eventually flickers out.

It takes a world of colour and gradient, and fashions it into black and white, all-or-nothing type thinking. If you aren’t willing to die, to matyr yourself for what you claim to love, it says, why bother trying at all?

But if something is my dream, I’m starting to think that for it to be achieved fully, as the best it could be, it needs to be viewed as a final puzzle piece completing a whole picture, instead of an end-all-be-all destination. I think I need to see it as an expansion of my life, not something I will face a lot of struggles for and then finally unlock so I can pass away without turning restlessly six feet under.

To reframe the narrative, I need to ask different questions.

I had been willing to die for my dream, but am I willing to live for it? Will I respect the vessel with which I am allowed to write by keeping an exercise routine, respecting my sleep and eating healthy? Will I push myself to gain new experiences that expand my world and the breath of my work? Will I cut off those who were draining me, make and upkeep healthy social connections that support me? Will I remove myself from situations that do not fit me?

Am I willing to craft a life where I am not only doing what I dream of, but also ensuring that I have the experience and capacity to do my dream justice as much as I can at any point of my life? To keep to the everyday habits and hours that are in line with achieving what I want without turning the dream into a nightmare?

Am I willing to make a life within which my dream can breathe comfortably?

In line with such questions, I made a change, and it was followed by another, then one more. I battled the urge to surge into my previous cycles, to feel those bloodshot eyes and hold an entire chunk of words in my hand. I started exercising regularly. I went out with friends, went to see exhibitions. I ignored the little voice in my head that insisted that this meant I was not taking my writing seriously, that I should be locking myself in a room and churning out words if writing was truly what mattered to me.

Because I dream of being an author.

I live to chronicle my experiences, thoughts, and journeys. I breathe to craft stories, to hold out a hot, bloody heart, and let people have a chance to feel it beating. I want to be able to steady breaths, to transform lives, to help people feel like they are not alone.

And to do that, I have to have these experiences, feel these emotions, and be a friend to the selves that exist within me (angels, demons and aggrieved by-standers who ‘just work here’ alike). I have to make enough room so that when my dream does arrive, it has the space to sit down, to play, argue, and make itself at home.

And if in the process, I get a life more lived-in, all the better.