The writer
I will give the words to a character from one of my novels, a character who is in fact based entirely on me, hence why I feel it is okay for me to do so.
"I had always wanted to be an historian, but I had had to give up that aspiration owing to my mercurial nervous system, which wasn't a difficult thing to do, in reality I had only wanted to be an historian because I had been good at history at school and for no other deeper reason, and so it was easy for me to change my aspiration, overnight as it were, as soon as I realised that my panic attacks would impede my ability to stand up in front of a classroom or, God forbid, a lecture hall full of students and perform the pedagogic role expected of an historian. So just like that, as they say, I set my sights on becoming a writer, a writer would not have to stand up in front of anyone and say anything, I had thought, I could simply write the words that I would be unable to say standing up or even sitting down, it not mattering whether I stood or sat, the point being that I just couldn't speak in front of people, not without having multiple debilitating panic attacks in any case, but in order to be a writer I actually had to write and that, it turned out, was far more difficult than I had expected it to be, many times I sat down to write and many times I wrote nothing, there being nothing to write, or nothing I could think of to write to be more precise.
Sometimes, however, I would manage to write something, not much but something, a start that I could perhaps build on I had perhaps optimistically believed, but when I came to review what I had written, I realised it was diabolically poor writing, writing that would never get published in a million years, rank awful, vomit-inducing writing in other words, writing that should have been immediately expunged from the record, but which I invariably and masochistically endeavoured to edit into something better or less egregious in any case, wasting many hours on labours that would always and ultimately prove fruitless, until I eventually came to see that the only possible course of action was to expunge the writing from the record and to start all over again, from fresh, as it were, at which point I would tell myself that this time it would be different, that the right words would effortlessly flow out of me and onto the page where they would be preserved for other people to read, maybe many people, I dared to think, I allowed myself to dream in other words that I could yet become a good writer, or at least a published writer, which is all I really wanted or thought I wanted, but the words didn't flow, they only sputtered out of me, moreover they were the wrong not the right words, arranged together in a syntactically mangled fashion in sentences that rambled on about things I knew were innately uninteresting or if they were interesting, they would only be interesting, I strongly suspected or deep down knew, to a very small section of the reading population, a section that itself was a very small section of the largely illiterate wider population, hence hardly anyone would be interested in reading the stuff I had written, which was prolix and self-indulgent and all the things writers are supposed to avoid in crafting their prose.
At bottom, of course, as with all aspiring writers who lack the talent to realise their ambition of getting published, I had nothing to say, even though I wrote thousands, hundreds of thousands of words, I said nothing, not once in all those words did anything remotely close to saying something emerge, rather I just blathered on about things that were completely routine, obvious, humdrum, clichéd and so forth, even though I felt at the time I was writing something profound or at the very least original, when I came to read over what I had written, I quickly realised that that feeling of having been writing something profound or original had misled me into thinking that I had actually written something of worth, which was never and could never be the case, given that I was fundamentally incapable of writing anything worthwhile, interesting, edifying etc.
I am either not ashamed or deeply embarrassed to say that this wanting-to-be-a-writer thing went on for a while, or as long as I could make my money last for, which was quite a long time since I needed and wanted very little that required the exchange of consideration, but in the end, as frugal as I was, the money ran out and I was forced to consider the only possibility left open to me, namely to find a so-called proper job"
And that is how I wound up becoming an accountant, a job which I was congenitally ill-suited to yet somehow ended up weirdly enjoying, in the 'superficial or masochistic' sense of enjoying. At least for a while anyway.
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