It’s been over six and a half months since I’ve completed a writing of my own initiative with plans to put it on TeenInk. I’ve added on to a couple pieces I sometimes thought would eventually become what I wanted them to be, but I have generally lost the desire to become a published writer. There are a few reasons for this, but I have to start from the beginning.

I started writing because I wanted to express my frustrations, or at least that is how I interpret it now in hindsight. I know this because it all started with a disgusting horror story about a group of vampires imprisoning women and harvesting their menstrual blood. All I ever wrote was a vague outline for that story. The main character was essentially me, which is going to be important for later. He was a teenager who felt alone in the world, never met his father but hated him, was seen as a strange boy, and was actually pretty noble. Towards the end of the story, Darek turns invisible and visits his old high school during a dance, catches his crush in the bathroom with her new boyfriend, and stabs him in the head so hard that the hilt pressed up against the guy’s forehead. I scared even myself writing the outline of Sinking in Blood or Until We Win or whatever the title was going to be. It’s nothing like what I wrote later on.

I continued writing only because of my ego. It can even be seen in my style. My stories always follow the main character around, and the main character is always me with some tweaks and exaggerations. What I thought I wanted to do was change the world with stories that would teach all people to love each other as brothers and sisters. My reasoning essentially this: we do not understand pre-life or afterlife or death, and all we have is our couple decades on this small rock in this complex universe. We should make this place as pleasant as possible because we do not understand what comes after. Even if it’s nothing, that is still terrifying to us. It sounded beautiful to me. I would become the greatest peacemaker of all time. The whole world would know me. That was the true reason why I wrote, right there. Deep down, the world did not matter too much to me. I just thought that I was amazing at writing and would become legendary just because two or three teachers told me I was very good. I’ve never really enjoyed reading, and English is a dreadful school subject to me. I write purely because I want to talk about myself. I don’t have the same characteristics that other writers have had. Writers have come from all sorts of backgrounds, but all of them enjoyed reading other people’s work. The harsh reality is that I don’t care much for uncovering some other person’s opinions masked by the person’s own fictional story.  

I thought I would rise to unprecedented literary prestige, and I would become a modern Confucius. Confucius was a huge inspiration to me. He was a philosopher whose students eventually made it into the Chinese government and brought order to the country under his teachings. I was crazy to think that the same thing could happen again. History does repeat itself, but some things only happen several times. There was never another Jesus Christ or another Roman empire. The closest man to Confucius I would say would be Karl Marx, his “students” being the Russian communists. My book about people treating each other right is nothing revolutionary-inspiring.

The reason Marx, Confucius, Machiavelli, and Plato are said to have shaped history in many different ways is because they had new things to bring to the table. Never was there such a raw, immoral work about politics as The Prince. Never was there such a beautifully enticing book as The Communist Manifesto when it was first written. I don’t have anything new to bring to the table.

I just essentially tell people to be good without lying to them about a man in the sky that will punish them if they are bad. Words are just words. It’s easy not to listen to them, especially if they’re just on a page. What really gets people united and brotherly is heart-breaking, hell-born, traumatizing cataclysm or the threat of it. During Vietnam, a lot Americas got awfully peaceful. After 9/11, Americans got rather patriotic. The French and the English fought each other for 100 years once, but came together to fight Germany in World War I and World War II. People only really care when awful things like that happen

I am putting my immaturity behind as much as possible, pursuing a career elsewhere, and continuing to occasionally write on the side. I’ve learned that there really is no understanding yourself. Philosophy tells people that it’s very important to know yourself, but I’m calling bulls*** and reminding everyone of Socrates: “As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.” My psychological analysis of my past behavior I think makes sense. All I know is that I lived two years of my life submerged in a tank of my own ego. The world I saw was blurred by all the ego in between my eyes and the things I saw. Now that I have opened a hatch, let all the ego poor out, and escaped the empty tank, I might very well be in some other way blinded.

It feels good to have written this, even though it’s lengthier than I thought it would be. I still have not discussed the girl I met over the summer or the classical and romantic personality types and how I changed from one to the other. I’ll save both of those for another memoir kind of writing like this or maybe a story.

I hope you’ve learned something. If you want to dissect your mind like I did, history will be your guide on that journey. It’s full of people making mistakes, so you should try to keep their mistakes in the back of your mind so that you don’t repeat them. Ask yourself, “Has this happened before? Has something like it happened before?” I related my story indirectly to the rise of communism. Like I mentioned before, communism is amazing on paper. It sounds better than heaven. My idea  for the future did too. In reality, communism was difficult to get up and running, caused poverty, and started conflicts. It was no better than capitalism. It all came from idealism. The Viet Cong and Bolsheviks wanted a better future for themselves and their children. In the end, the Viet Cong, the Bolsheviks, and Mike Liberty need to grow up and realize how awful people are at living with one another. 

Thank you for reading.