Thursday, July 24, 2014

some things sat by so carelessly

so remember that time i wrote please listen and put it up for sale for any random stranger to read? yeah, well, for a while now, i have been having some second thoughts about it. not about writing it or sharing it, but more about what i wrote.

see, i wrote most of the prosetry in that collection over a period of years where i was feeling depressed and battling ugly thoughts and coming to all the wrong conclusions about the people in my life (but some of the right ones, too, if i'm being perfectly honest). one review i got on the book, and the one that's probably stuck with me the most, said that there were poems that were melodramatic and read like i was swept away by the power of words. (i'm pretty sure i addressed that comment on here before, but bear with me. there is a point to me bringing it up again.) depression is probably the most melodramatic thing in the world, and i do not mean that in a disparaging way at all. i think it was prozac nation that said that when you're depressed, everything is the worst thing that can happen. you can spend the same amount of tears on a cockroach dying as you would on your own dad dying because they are both equally the worst and saddest thing in the world. the reviewer had written that for a few poems, she could not relate at all and just kept thinking, "surely, it can't be that bad." and to reference the dead cockroach, maybe to an outsider it isn't that bad, but to you, it really, truly is. and for the most part, i like the overdramatic prosetry that came from me working through all of that stuff, it is an honest reflection of how i felt at the time, and i wouldn't change it for anything. 

but - and there is always a but - there are some things that i have been thinking about changing. 

see, in the midst of my anger and depression fueled writing, i wrote some lines that leave a bad taste in my mouth whenever i reread them, that make me cringe internally whenever i even think of them. there are a handful of different lines from a few different poems where i wrote something that romanticizes depression and/or suicide and at a point in my life where i am completely anti-romanticizing any mental illness because i grew up. there is a line where i wrote something like "you can't see the beauty in a slit wrist or the poetry in pooling blood" and that line haunts me. because i so strongly disagree with the sentiment in it. but it's out there, maybe forever, with my name attached to it.

so, i guess what i'm trying to say is while i'm all for leaving past pieces unchanged to accurately reflect myself at that time, when there is an idea that i feel is harmful and toxic, should i change it? it's not like please listen is some super popular book with a huge audience and being read by millions of impressionable minds, but still. 

*Smile Like You Mean It - The Killers

2 comments:

  1. no.
    if jk rowling couldn't take back ron and hermione, you can't take back pooling blood.
    also, i like melodrama, and I believe i am always melodramatic without the legitimate excuse of depression.

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    1. yeaaah but there's a difference between glorifying unhealthy emotions and seemingly giving the guy the girl because he got nothing else, you know?
      and i love the melodrama. it's just those specific phrases that make me wish i had reined it in a bit.

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