|
 The
True Story
How does one start? Let's start it simple. It gets complicated
soon, but that's how life is.
Hello. The name is Lin. I'm a 25 years
old soon-to-be mother* from Stavanger, Norway. I currently live
in Stockholm, Sweden, where I work and live (in still unwed sin)
with the soon-to-be father. I love him, I love this city, I love
my life and by god, I love to write.
But that was not always the case. (This
is where it starts to get complicated.)
I used to hate words. I used to shun
them, back away from all things written.
I was a stupid girl. A stupid, retarded
idiot. At least, that's what they used to call me in school,
the floaters and easy-goers, who pointed and laughed, because
the stupid girl never did right, never learned. My teachers and
my friends kept telling me not to listen. It's quite common,
they said. It's just dyslexia, many people have that, you can
get help. But it didn't stop me from hearing those words, and
the words kept burning holes in my head, until they broke through,
and I started believing them myself.
Finally, I gave up, decided that I was
indeed an idiot, and stopped caring. Much of my poetry dwells
on events from the following four years. Much of it still neatly
tucked away in unpublished files on my computer, where they will
remain.
Let's just say that there are lines in
my face, even if they are not visible on the outside. I have
lived out loud, dumb and dangerous enough for a lifetime, and
now I'm feeling old. Now, old is not something that a regular
25-year-old woman is supposed to feel. But I'm glad I do, because
the option would have been a plethora of other things, much more
unpleasant.
All because of words. Words can do pretty
mean things. But they can also do the opposite.
This brings us to poetry, and to the
reason why I write. Somewhere along the line, I finally snapped
out of my self-image of Stupid and began to look at it all with
sober eyes. It was not me, it was just an organ in my body that
didn't quite function right: my brain. And the brain is a wonderful
thing. With bad eyesight, it develops better hearing. Some can
solve advanced calculations in there, others can write symphonies,
and yet others paint pictures.
My brain was not good with the content
of text, but I soon found out that the look of text was an entirely
different turkey. Such an entirely different turkey that, just
four months after my return from my lengthy self-inflicted fuckup,
I managed to get myself hired as a junior art director. A new
life, a new job, new confidence in me, both from myself and others.
And a normal, quiet life.
With the love and support of a few people
close to me, I decided, once and for all, that I would not let
a mere handicap hold me down, one that I actually could work
myself out of. So I started to write. It went slow at first,
frustrating, but in my own pace I managed to find new tricks
to it.
It's kind of hard to explain. If you
drive a car, you don't have to think of all the gears and wheels
and fuel injection all the time, those things take care of themselves
most of the time. When I read and write, I have to keep those
things in mind, or it will stop working. But with enough practice,
it was not at all impossible.
In time, I also found those great supportive
muses out on the Internet, and Lauren is one of the more prominent.
They, and my poetizing man, opened my eyes to the language beyond
prose. This was my ballpark, here I could do what the devil I
pleased with language, and no one would judge me. The perfect
place to refine the mechanics.
I've beaten my demon, and made language
my bitch. And I intend to make the most of that. So I write,
I bend words to my will, instead of the other way around. I abuse
language before it has the chance to abuse me. I've got a lot
of catching up to do, and although the poems themselves span
from pitch black to Teletubbies merry, this is my personal catharsis.
If it makes anyone happy to read what I do unto language, and
I manage to light just a tiny spark somewhere, it all just might
have been worth it.
-Lin
15.I.2004
* Note: In the time that took for
this feature to be ready for online publishing, the mother-to-be
status has changed into real mama-hood. (LH)
Lin's author page at
Literotica.com |