Writer-Storm

By: Amelie Brooks-Hochheimer

I recently put on a play in which the main character Grace talks about how hard she finds writing. She is based on me. While rehearsing said play, Aria, the actor playing Grace, said, “this is a character who hates writing.” 

So then I thought, do I hate writing? Maybe I hate writing! 

I guess it would be too simple to state that as what it is: just plainly, and wholly true. It is agony, for sure, always trying to think of ways to break open and spill out onto the page. I have been undertaking that process since I was ten years old, probably earlier, and I will probably do it for much longer. And it has been a journey! I have been caught up in phrasing and spelling and parsing, I have been devoted to copying and pasting and mimicking and fretting, I have been a nun and a thief and a liar and a leech with my words. And I have been ridiculously self indulgent, as you can see. 

All of this and only 25: the oldest I have ever been and the youngest I will ever be.

I don’t think I hate writing. The thing that really gets me, that really bothers me, is my capacity for imagination. 

When I was five, I would run around the forest by my house and find mushroom caps, twigs, leaves, and little stones, and build them into fairy houses. Day after day sitting and building, as careful an architect as a five year old can be. And whimsical. I guess part of me knew that fairies weren’t real, and the houses would fall away in the rain and the mud into nothing, but it gave me so much pleasure to imagine they were real. It gave a special feeling, like a secret, like having the key to a door only I could see. If there were fairies in the world, that meant there was magic, and if I was participating in that magic, maybe I was magic too. 

As I grew older, I thought more about rules and structures. My middle school best friends were nerds like I was, but I could never resist the allure of the popular white girls, thin (of course) and with shiny blonde hair that fell in perfect curtains. I gave up my fixation with magic and other worlds to try and make my mark clearly and undeniably in this one. I tried and failed to be: a know it all, a social climber, a vegan, a social justice warrior, a depressed self destructive Tumblr girl, an insta baddie, a theater kid, a novelist, a poet, a dancer. And in love, always in love. So many lives I imagined for myself! 

The only problem was, reality kept creeping in. I imagined myself as a girl someone could love, and was told I was probably just a compulsive liar. I imagined myself as someone who could be an Ivy League scholar, only to get a 13-something on my SATs and almost flunk out of math class. I tried to go shopping with my friends but ended up broke and in a fight with my stepdad. There was always something (probably me) in the way of my perfect imagined version of my life, and I never seemed to realize that until it was too late. 

Though I can imagine a better world, I can also imagine a worse one. 

One where everyone is mean to each other all the time, where people are self serving and judgemental, where there’s no point in even leaving my house, because all that waits outside is destruction and despair. 

When I was 19 and in my first semester of college, I started being unable to fall asleep at night. It was partly my roommate’s snores keeping me awake, but mostly visions and certainties of my inevitable death. 

I will have to get on the subway tomorrow, and someone could bomb my train car, or there could be a shooter, there’s so many mass shootings these days, or I could get hit by a car, isn’t it crazy that I haven’t gotten hit by a car yet living in this city? Everyone drives like a maniac and I jaywalk all the time. (I have an anxiety disorder if that wasn’t clear already.) 

I was horrified of being seen as myself, I think. Horrified of being correctly clocked as a nervous, insecure person with no grand plans and nothing to show for my life thus far. I wanted to be loved so badly, and all I could think to do was imagine it. This is one of the most destructive parts of my overly active imagination; it feels so real. 

I spent my formative years reading hundreds of thousands of words of fanfiction, searching up TV show couples just to see if I could get invested enough in shipping them to bother watching the whole show, marathoning romcom after romcom after romcom. I can write a pretty amazing love story, if I do say so myself. But as years of delusion and unrequited romance have shown me, I can’t write my own love story. It’s just something that has to happen to a person, and I was always fearful of things happening to me. 

I think writing is hard for me for this reason: I can’t always find a way to boil down my imagination into tangible words and concepts that can be communicated to other people. Everything always seems so much bigger than that. And besides, how does someone with such an active imagination give it all up even for a little bit to stand with feet firmly planted on the Earth? I’ve started going to yoga again. I like breathing deeply even though it’s insanely hot in there. I like the mountain pose they make us do with our feet on the ground and our hands reaching out trying to feel the energy of the room. 

I cannot do irony and I cannot do anything experimental. I am focused on loving, because I think that’s the best thing there is to do. I have my heart on my sleeve and I only know one way to write and one way to be, and that’s to be how I am and hope it’s ok. 

I am always growing and learning, and I think part of the gift of my imagination is that it’s flexible, it’s open to change. And if I can make something feel that real and that important with my own imagination, maybe I can invite other people to feel that way too. I am a writer and an imaginer of worlds and I want to imagine love and kindness and make people feel good. Maybe I can look outside of the tornado in my own head and give something to the people who want it. 

And that’s all I have for now.