i am a writer

like i am yellow

This past week, I’d spent cumulatively 15 hours writing flowery excerpts with no through line. 7 pages, unusable. Yea, but didn’t you have fun just doing it? No. I’m severely pissing myself off.

Here’s the truth. Writing isn’t about having fun for me. It’s about asserting dominance over the obsessive abstractions I can only define as: Thoughts. Only when the Thoughts have submitted to my will, organized into a rhythmic truth that is both mine and belonging to something larger, can I perform a revisionist history and call the experience “fun.”

I am not a lighthearted person. Not by surface-level definition.

This can confuse me. It is in dissonance with how I present. I present yellow. I am yellow. I am innately, inescapably yellow. I know this because I’m not running the block asking what I am. Yet, often, people are letting me know that I’m yellow. On my birthday, some of my best friends individually tell me I remind them of yellow. My exes all landed on nicknames that imply a yellowness - “banana” and “tweety” and “buttercup.” Last week at the Bistro, when I made friends with the girls at the table beside me, she said, “Your aura is a light yellow that brightens then darkens at the edges.” I was tempted to say, “I know.”

Yellow is not a bad way to be perceived. I’m flattered. Most people mean it kindly. But, at its worst - I am held to a standard of cheeriness only achievable by Funshine Carebear. Or there is a vague implication of stupidity, as many believe optimism is reliant on a certain kind of blindness, an inability to see or hold contradictions.

This is where it is misconstrued. How can yellow both be a smiling denial of reality and also the color of light? Sure, one day it’s warm, illuminating. But, the next it’s relentless, glaring. Its primary function is to show you and show you and show you. While casting a shadow at every angle.

Yes, seemingly pleasant. However, its endurance is not gentle.

My parents have gotten really into YouTube. They love this one lifestyle creator who lives on an Arctic island. We watched her “day in the life” video about her summer there - when the sun never sets. In the midst of forced awakeness, she says she prefers the winters, 24 hours of darkness, to the Midnight Sun.

I thought about the Midnight Sun for months. I didn’t know why until my birthday. I was writing out reasonable goals for myself, and planning how to attain them. A voice unlike my own, cutting through my pragmatism, superseded all rational forethought: You cannot escape your nature.

I’ve always found my passionate nature, and the desires within it, inconvenient and irrational. Ill-suited for someone who also values privacy and stability… or do I value that? Really and truly value that? Have I just learned to fear exposure and imbalance? There was something about acknowledging that intensity exists freely in nature. The Midnight Sun, though maddening, serves some kind of purpose or value in the natural world. But, then again, what good is justifying its existence, testifying to its value, when its burning presence is inevitable?

Are you still with me? I’m afraid I lost you at the third “I am yellow.”

Here’s what I want to say to you.

Our natures are just as inevitable. Because of that, they are often unreasonable to the modern world, which insists on controlling nature. Resist the urge to domesticate what is alive inside you. I don’t know who you are, or what you want. But I’ve just begun to imagine you get it by working with your nature, rather than against it.

Now, here’s what I want.

I want to be a writer. I want to be a great writer. Someday, I want someone to offer me money for it, so I can do it all of the time. Because I am a writer. If not by trade, by nature. Everything about me lends itself to an imperative to tell some truth. At its worst, it registers as a disorder. Obsessive and single-minded and vigilant. At its best, it’s baked into thoughtfulness and empathy and a beautiful offering: understanding people well. I am okay with the solitude it requires. I am okay with it not being fun until it is. I want the inconvenience of myself. I want to be true.

One of my earliest, most vivid memories is of complaining to a librarian because I was offended they weren’t teaching us how to read or write in preschool. Annoyed that I’d have to wait an entire year for kindergarten to learn, I decided I’d teach myself.

I rearranged letters from the alphabet and brought them to my parents, asking, “Is this a word?” They’d say, “No.”

Eventually, I got one.

My first written word was: Sun.