Nothing of Consequence, No One Will Read
Whenever I sit down to write a journal entry, two thoughts enter my mind:
I have nothing of consequence to say.
No one reads this thing anyway.
These are things I hear when I sit down to write anything, really. Sometimes (such as when I sit down to write something for you here, Dearest One), I’m more likely to believe the voices. I stare at the blank page, determine I have nothing of consequence to say and that if I did, hell, no one will read this anyway. It’s why you haven’t seen much here, I suppose. But it’s also why I’ve written about twenty novels over the course of my life that no one has ever read.
I write because I love to write. And writing loves me. I absolutely would not be alive today were it not for writing.
When I was a child, I was excited to learn new words and write them down. It felt like a form of magic (because it is: In the beginning, there was the Word). When I realized how very different I was from most of the people around me, writing and drawing pictures helped me to understand that God had made no mistake when He created me and maybe I should stick around and find out the why of it, even if it was just so that both of us could have a good laugh. Writing became about finding my place in this world and in the Universe. To this day, there is much I don’t understand or otherwise metabolize unless I take the time to write about it.
Later (somewhere before my teens), I got the idea that writing would make me rich. I was an exceptional Black kid with an exceptional talent that would reap exceptional rewards. I believed the hype that anything that was worth anything was worth money, and that by being an exceptional Black kid, I would stand out as exceptional in a colorblind world. (Colorblindness was what they tried to teach us back then. News flash: It worked. But not in the way you might think.) With precious few exceptions, however, the adults around me discouraged this dream.
Mind you, it wasn’t the get rich part that they took issue with. White teachers who discouraged me from writing, I think, came from a place of discomfort. My mother made sure we went to schools that were about as privileged as schools could get and still remain public. The students and faculty at these schools were also, incidentally, mostly white and well-off. (Think Sunnydale minus the vampires.) Non-white kids, especially Black kids, had to learn to tread lightly in this white cocoon. During the obligatory What I Did Over the Summer writing assignments, the white kids wrote about vacations with their parents, summer AP classes, and their daddy’s yachts. And I wrote about Dad drinking and drugging, Dad going to jail (again and again), Dad hitting Mom (again), Mom and Dad’s divorce, poverty, police, violence. These things were not only different to the people at Sunnydale—they were downright alien. And scary, at that. I learned very quickly to not tell the truth. The shift to fiction immediately eased their discomfort. They were uncomfortable because of the simple fact that I wrote about being me—queer, brown me—and the things I experienced and witnessed. When you’re trying to teach kids colorblindness—that race does not matter—anything that speaks from or to a place of non-whiteness is a problem.
And, let’s face it, the idea of colorblindness was never colorblindness at all: It was whitewashing. It was attempting to fortify the white cocoon many white people lived it (and some still do) by absorbing the benefits of diversity without bringing to bear any of the actual work or responsibility that comes with it.
By I digress.
Later, I remember a Black guidance counselor telling me that we needed more Black politicians and journalists. I remember thinking, Fuck that. I write about superheroes and metaphysics and monsters. And by that point, I felt more of me in those things than I did in writing what was actually happening around me. This was back when all the news was about how “apathetic” Gen X was—a whole generation of untouchables. Remember that?
(Now it seems like you have a Boomers trying to beat down the door to be included in Gen X. Weird.)
In short: Because I was writing to find my place in the world but felt separate from it, I was writing about myself in relation to the world. This made the people around me—my connections to that world—uncomfortable for various reasons. So they reacted with discouragement. Which was cute for them.
But I wrote anyway.
The voices are still there, by the way. One is wondering what the consequence of what I’m writing here is. The other is saying no one will read it anyway.
Fuck them. I keep writing.
Those voices are not mine.
The one that tells me I have nothing of consequence to say belongs to the guidance counselor who told me the world needs more Black politicians and journalists. I didn’t disagree with her on that, but part of me bristled (still bristles) when I think of the implication of what she said: Black politicians and journalist matter—they have things to say that are of consequence. They matter. The correlative, then, is that I say nothing of consequence; my voice does not matter. I don’t matter.
The voice that tells me no one will read this anyway was a white English teacher’s voice who almost put me off writing altogether. Somewhere along the line, the voice changed to become my own—the snivel of a scared, lonely faggoty Black queer thing. It meant my writing was not fit for human consumption. It meant I was worthless, and, by extension, so was anything I created. That’s what it meant at first, at least. Then it twisted itself into a strange form of sanctuary: “Go on and write it: No one’s going to read it anyway.”
It was who I was. Invisibility meant safety, I thought.
Fuck all of that.
That is not who I am now. That is not my voice, and if voices were meant to never be heard, God would have made them something else—silence.
So what’s the consequence of all this?
Well, for starters, a commitment: I’ll be showing up here to write more often things that no one may ever read and that may or may not have consequence. I’ll be making more concerted efforts to share my stories with the world as well, because—quite frankly—the world needs new stories, particularly if we want to stop making the same old mistakes.
Words are magic, and when you string them together into a story, it becomes something beyond magic, beyond even power. It’s so powerful, in fact, that if we don’t actively engage in play and use it for good, it backs up on us and goes shadow. And the world is sinking in shadow stories right now.
Which leads me to you, Dearest One. The consequence of all of this for you is merely a challenge: Write, paint, sculpt, dance, play, sing, act—do whatever the thing is that brings you awake and alive.
A madness is writing a silly shadow fiction right now that it’s a wicked thing to be awake. Think about that: The opposite of awake is asleep. They want your eyes closed while you play Follow the Leader.
That isn’t innocuous madness, Dearest One. It’s cosmic horror.
And now, to work.