Opening Manila Envelopes

Truthfully, I am hurt by T.S. Eliot's comment about how amateur or bad writers imitate. The pages, they were put into manila envelopes with a time written across the cover (summer '04, old, somewhat recent through '05). You can see I don't really have a good system going for me. Anyhow, I put them there, I wrote across the front- these are the things I had written down in all these time that passed. I pass through obvious stylistic transitions, some of them so obvious that they were obviously not mine. The awkward transitional attempts were definitely mine, but the styles I tried on recognizably someone else's. (Or maybe that's even too generous, I'm assuming I actually did a good job imitating.)

And it is frustrating now, to pull apart the pieces which were heavily influenced by other writings and encounters in general. I have nothing to savor.

It is strange meeting myself like this. Through pages and pages of lined and blank papers, typed or written on, doodles or whatnot. I wonder which part(s) of it comprises of the real me. Do I bare my soul in these lines as every writer ought to, or am I lying even to myself. These times, I can't even explain why I write. There are plenty of impulses I could have tried to follow through with. My eyes and ears meet with stimuli every moment, and I am learning all the time about the world around me. But I write. I say I don't care much for criticism, but I study my work with zealous care seeking the flaws others have found. I say I don't care much for praise, but I read over lines which have struck someone particularly, and smile, or let out a content sigh.

What then, am I driven by? I don't have that sense of obligation to truth as a journalist. And I certainly don't have that sense of obligation to beauty as an artist. Does my work, and my person, truly comprise of the things I cannot identify myself as? I don't really want the remainder of my life, my academic career, my professional life, to pan out in the form of a literary mechanism- an instance of lytosis. I must be beyond it somehow. And to find that somehow, to find myself, I should quit looking back, sifting through whom I was in search of whom I am.