Lessons In Stupidity

One lovely morning (very early morning, around two) I went on to save another chapter of the nonfiction I was writing. A folder popped up, and funny enough it was empty. ‘That’s odd’, I thought. I quickly opened my Writing folder which had other subfolders in it (Short Stories, Warwick, Nonfiction, Reviews, Songs, Novel, etc.) and gasped. There was nothing in it. Except for the document I had saved five seconds previously, it was empty. Everything I had written since 2007 was gone.

Let me backtrack a bit and tell you at which point in my life I was when this happened.

It was (and still is) a few months before I would cross the invisible line, climb that steep mountain, become officially grown up by Western standards and irreversibly old and desperate by Belarusian standards, etcetera, etcetera – I was turning thirty come November. So I was very full of myself and my great accomplishments at such a tender age. I was thinking how I would be justified to argue with rude taxi drivers having turned all big and mighty. I replayed Beyonce’s I Was Here around the clock, bathing in all the glory and drama of the upcoming event. I had thought of how I always had this wisdom in me but only by turning a certain age society permitted me to demonstrate it – and the time was near! I daydreamed of how I would use real creams that actually did something. I thought how I would no longer be stuck in this limbo of still being in my 20s but feeling like the fun wore off a long time ago. And so on down the list. You know me. Drama Queen.

I was going to celebrate on my blog with a little speech full of pathos and then present a list of dry statistics of what I had done in my thirty years on the planet. I was going to count everything I had written and let the numbers do the talking: how many stories, plays, novels, poems, songs, essays, reviews and copywriting pieces I had written, how many pedis and manis I had (1:1), how many men I had slept with, how many serious relationships I had been in (easy one: zero), and so on. All I can be proud of is that I do remember the number of men I had slept with, which is commendable in this day and age. Everything else, at this point, is a mystery.

I remember reading an interview with Leslie Marmon Silko were she talked of the Western obsession with written word and the Native American reliance on the spoken word. The story that lived on had to be strong and potent; it had to evolve as it moved from person to person, from generation to generation. If stories died out, if tribes died out, there were no regrets. They weren’t strong enough. They didn’t deserve to be. (I know there is a correlating theory by a famous bearded man from the West, according to which my strongest work had indeed survived, but because I was born in the Soviet Union and have a general distrust of men and bearded men in particular, I would like to stick with Leslie’s beautiful stand on things.)

Maybe a personal apocalypse (from Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apokálypsis; "lifting of the veil" or "revelation") is what I deserved in my elevated state of mind. The panic, fear, shock and disappointment that came as an aftermath brought me down to earth. Thanks to supporters from LinkedIn I did get computer genius help and had most of my old files recovered, but not the 50000-word nonfiction I had been writing for the last year, the most important achievement of all. At first I felt liberated and light, almost lifted off the ground, knowing it was very emotional in places, very raw, and knowing I had been given a chance to write it from scratch as a consistent piece of work. As reality sunk in and I began to realize that all the sweat, blood and tears that went into it, the sleepless nights, the hungry days, the research, the horrors of it, the honesty of it, would have to be repeated, with the same intensity, I felt tired and dumb.

I know it is my test, and I intend to pass it.

My tirade against journalists and immediate writing sits on my blog and laughs at me. Because I had kept things to myself for so long, thinking ‘It’s not good enough’ or ‘It’s not the right time’, all I have left now is the stuff I had shared with friends and colleagues, stuff I had printed out for my portfolio (creative and copywriting), or posted on my blogs. I don’t know why but in my head the Universe is a beautiful ghetto girl with a cool do and lots of bracelets as loud as her mouth and she keeps waving her hands at me yelling ‘U think u fly butchu aint all that, bitch!’ I know, I know, I got a little carried away, like a girlie in a new dress staring at her own reflection for too long and walking straight into a lamp pole. I gotta admit – it hurts.

I still think the best thing I had ever written is an essay/review on 28 Days Later. And the Universe seems to agree, because it had survived. So I’m not gonna wait for anything to happen to justify its right to be. I am posting it here and now. Because the lesson is learned.