My Self Sabotaging Mind (Flash Fiction Continued)

Thirdly, I thought it was the word flow problem. And it is said that one should do “morning ranting” to help the word flow. I did try it for one or two weeks, but then it became boring. The mindless rambling didn’t go anywhere and it felt like I was wasting the energy of my typing fingers. I didn’t feel that it helped my problem at all. Then I realized that I never have a word flow problem at all, but rather I have an unsatisfactory word arrangement problem. Often my self criticism is so strong that I just can’t write. It is rather debilitating. At such moments, I almost went back to the time when I was young, facing my battling parents who couldn’t kill each other because it was illegal, couldn’t divorce because it was a social suicide, couldn’t accept the reality and make the best of it because their illusions didn’t allow them to do it. I could only look at them in despair. They were so hopeless. Is my writing as hopeless as their doomed relationship?     

Fourthly, it might be my memory. My memory is fine, not good and not bad. If it is better, I probably can come up with better words when I need it. My mediocre memory is probably the reason why my reading is not so effective. A lot of reading, but not much retainment. A lot of bustle and hustle, but very little result. If you ask me what I read last month, I can’t even tell the books name, except some vague impression of reading “What We All Long For” in the bathroom, and feeling how good a book it was even if it didn’t have a plot. I have to go back to read all those highlighted lines. I always say this to myself, but I never bother to do it. Not only that, I should also go through the quotes in goodreads.com, write a review, and read what other people have to say about the book. I need to do all these, but I just postpone and postpone until it goes into oblivion.

After a lot of thinking on this issue, I still don’t have a satisfactory answer—why do I feel so unsatisfied with my writing. Then several days ago, I suddenly had a flash of revelation. Maybe this is called epiphany. For several days, this ideas bubbled in my mind and I considered it again and again. For now, I think I am quite satisfied with this new answer, although I may become unsatisfied again in the future. It is the problem with my ears. I have a non-native speaker’s ears, which subscribe to a different beauty standard, find pleasure in the different sounds of words and phrases. My ears feel unsatisfied with my writing because I always suppress my own cochlea and my own sense of style. I mistakenly believe that my own sense of the language is inferior. I have been chasing an illusion (a bit like my own parents) of beauty (supposedly dictated by people who are deemed more admirable and authentic with English than I am) and disregarding my own sense of beauty. And this has caused a lot of mischief in my writing and in my sense of satisfaction. Actually a non-native speaker’s ear may not be so bad.