Don't Look Back

           Bad things always seem to happen to people who look back, don't they? They get turned into pillars of salt, or the monster rears up and gets them, or they watch everything they love go up in flames, or run straight into a brick wall while everyone around them points and laughs because oh my God, look at that moron, right? Emotionally speaking, looking back on the past can be a minefield, too, especially for people (or brooding Byronic vampires, I don't judge) who get so caught up in their own pasts and the various highs or lows in them that they can't move on and end up missing out on everything going on around them today, dragged down screaming into the eternal abyss that is the past.

          Why am I getting so philosophical today, you might ask? It all has to do with the eternal abyss that is my room, whose clutter has been in a constant state of flux as long as I've occupied it. I'll do a massive, Herculean cleanup of it, it'll be neat and organized and wonderful for a few months if I'm lucky, and then it'll revert to its true form, which is roughly that of a tornado-stricken stationary store. Piles of folders, notebooks, binders, books, papers.... To be fair to myself, the last near-six years of health problems aren't exactly conducive to the kind of upkeep I'd like to manage, and it's thankfully not an issue of actual trash building up; I'm not hoarding used tissues or dead cats or anything, and all my skeletons are kept neatly tucked in the closet where they belong. But people who know me, and who have stepped foot in the room during one of its avalanche periods and lived to leave it, know that it has a tendency to blossom out of control no matter what I or we try to tame it. 

          Recently it was getting to the point where I was once again feeling smothered by all the piles of STUFF accumulating and tipping over everywhere, and yesterday I was overcome with a strong feeling of "Fuck it" and, despite not feeling my best (what else is new?), I dove in and spent several hours shifting, collecting, rearranging, throwing out, and generally cleaning up the mess. Looking it over later, it doesn't show that I've done all that much, at least right now, but I know it's on its way, and no matter how many muscle spasms and allergy attacks I have to get through, at some point I'll make it. 

          On the bright side of this sudden compulsion to clean, I finally managed to corral most of my binders into a neat, easily accessible bin, and I also discovered I have a lot more folders on hand than I previously thought, and there's no way on God's green Midgard I should be buying more any time soon. Half of these folders, recycled from my and my brother's old school years for the most part, had old papers and things in them, left over from the Last Massive Cleaning I pulled off before my health issues started; I remembered that, because I'd gathered the ones I thought I needed or might need later and stored them in these folders, figuring that at least then they wouldn't be loose or all over the place, and I decided to go through them because I also figured half of what I'd thought it so imperative to keep back then I'd be able to throw away now, knowing I'd never need or use it. 

          And to hasten this exposition along, that was true. I did toss a lot of stuff, and gathered the rest of it away to free up some space. But what I also came across, and what prompted the moral of this post, was a metric fuckload of my old stories. I could tell they were my older work not just because they were buried away in the deep dark where I didn't have to see them and remember what I had wrought, but because my handwriting was a large, looping scrawl that could probably be seen from space, because I wrote the titles of the stories in huge-ass letters at the top of every first page (and sometimes even in pen—the hubris of Younger Me astounds), and because the main characters of almost every story had the same goddamn two names (and I will not tell them here, though those who know me can probably make an educated guess).

          As if that wasn't enough to warn me that these stories were from the early 2000s, the pop-culture and hip-trend references I constantly and arbitrarily made definitely were, as well as the song lyrics I often had characters speak word-for-word, or cry to as they played on the radio, or hysterically cry to at a school dance, or that I named the whole fucking story after. Music has often played a strong role in my writing, as it has with many others, and that's a good thing. That's not my problem with what I found going back through these torn-out notebook pages I once thought would launch me to stardom. It's the blatant, nonsensical way it was used, as well as the stories themselves, that made me cringe. I will admit, here and now, that at one point in my early writing I had a story with a vital plot point that hinged on a character's heartfelt karaoke rendition of "I Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore." I will also admit that that particular story wasn't as far back in my past as I would like, considering that the two main characters had new names for once, and I will reassure you all right here and now that not only will that particular trash fire never see the light of day, I never finished it (shocker), nor reached that climactic desperate declaration of love. 

          But I'll stop there, before I start banging my head on the keyboard to erase the memories of these and other horrors that populated the pages of my (mostly non-supernatural, non-horror, until I reached my years-long Vampires Phase) stories. Or, if not to erase them, since they're the point here, to fight the horrors down long enough for me to finish this.

          I've read a lot of articles and books about writing that suggest never reading or attempting to finish earlier work, since you're not the same writer you were when you wrote it. To a point I agree with this; usually when I've returned to older stories I've rewritten or changed them extensively, although with some of my more recent unfinished stories I've returned to without much issue when the mood strikes me again. I did save a few of those older, horrible stories and notes for other older, horrible stories that I found, because I thought there might be something worth salvaging in them at some point. Others went right on the trash pile, with me cringing as I threw them. I know I'm a different writer now than I was then; it's amply evident from one look. But in the moment, that didn't make it any better as I thumbed through all those crumpled, huge-handwriting-filled pages and saw what I at one point had thought was so good I would've signed my name to it, which was so terrible plot-wise, character-wise, description-wise, and every other -wise it could be that I wouldn't sign your name to it now. At best, it had a scrap of something worth saving, or the glimmering of an original idea; at worst, it was fan fiction with all of the fervor and none of the ability, or the balls to up and admit it. Also, curiously, I stumbled across a couple stories I couldn't remember ever starting, even though I'd gotten a decent way into them before my attention was captured by something else, and for the life of me I couldn't remember them even when I made myself read them through; no bells rung, no memory sparked.    

          I know, I know. Every writer has stories or poems or articles or novels that they look back on and feel this way about, including some they've gotten published (I guess I was lucky in that respect). Every writer has to suck a bit before they get better, because that's how you get better. You force yourself to stare down your mistakes and fix them, or at least move past them, so that as your writing advances you can look back on the older stuff and see how far you've come, if you're lucky enough. And yes, some of that was going through my mind yesterday, and every time I think about it now; it was a bit of an ego boost to see that my work's gotten better since then (at least, I like to think it has), and it's definitely given me something to compare against when I'm struggling with a new story or novel or poem, convinced it's the most Chuck-awful thing ever conceived or executed in a writer's mind, a veritable crime against the paper it's written on. It may be shit, Sarah, but hey, at least it's not that shitty. 

          All of that is true. But is also reminded me that sometimes what you do just blows, for one reason or another, and sometimes you just feel down about that. And it was a sobering reminder of how quickly and easily you can get sucked down into the muck, giving up time to embarrassing or depressing memories that completely destroy your mood, no matter how good you've gotten since then. Because when you're swallowed by the bad, the good doesn't matter, and you have to really try to break your way free, to swim back up to the surface and feel the light on your face. This goes for writers and non-writers, applicable to everyone and everything. God knows it's true with my health as well as my writing, and I'm sure y'all have felt that way at some point or another in your life, some more strongly or more often than others. I'm not trying to preach or anything, I'm just relaying what I learned again yesterday while trying to hack my way through my room (along with the fact that I have way more usable folders than I thought I did). So I guess in the end, the lesson here isn't to never look back, it's just to make sure that isn't all you do, because pretty soon it'll drive you screaming batshit crazy.