Introducing: WORD/PLAY
Or, gaining empathy for boomers using Facebook for the first time as I try to learn Substack at 30.
Can I be honest?
I don’t know what I intend to accomplish by creating a blog. My therapist suggested I embrace the not-knowing, so here I am. Embracing. I hate that social media pressures us to build a brand and an audience. I hate using the word “content” to describe my creative outlets. I’ve never seen myself as someone with the kind of gregarious, extroverted energy that seems necessary to thrive as a content creator.
By contrast, my passion for creative writing took root precisely because I felt invisible and out of place in most areas of my life throughout adolescence. I could be whomever I wanted in my stories, and I could turn ugly feelings into pretty sentences. While my peers played sports at recess, I sat on the steps and read the dictionary every day in grade school. I wrote down every word that sounded interesting, then its definition.
Soon, I had filled an entire notebook full of new words, and I challenged myself to incorporate as many of them into my short stories as possible. As my vocabulary expanded, I could bring my imagination to life with greater detail and specificity. I love words. They’re the building blocks for all the weird, corny, dramatic, romantic, and depraved thoughts swimming in our skulls. Something can be sad, or maudlin, or depressing, or morose, or melancholic, or doleful. There’s a different circumstance for each word to shine.
I suppose that sentiment is what’s inspiring me to start WORD/PLAY. My many years of writing poetry and professional grant proposals trained me to get the most mileage from each word. When you’re facing syllable, stanza, and character/word limits, you quickly learn what’s redundant and what drives your narrative forward. For a while, I enjoyed that cognitive puzzle.
The passion faded at a certain point in my late twenties, though. Blame it on perfectionism. Blame it on a shift in priorities. Blame it on constant comparison to other artists. Blame it on the fear that I had missed my window to do anything impressive and become a successful author. Hell, blame it on laziness. I’ve wasted a lot of time on blame.
I’m learning to reconnect with my creative energy, largely thanks to the past year of trauma-focused treatment with a wonderful care team. Rather than stress about the outcome, I want to be intentional about enjoying the creative process for its own sake. Alongside returning to poetry and exploring songwriting, this blog is another outlet to practice and, ideally, foster a space to build confidence in my voice again. Not just as a writer, but also as a person existing in society on this rock in space. I used to be so indignant and vocal about my opinions, and perhaps I swung too far the other way and overcorrected.
The premise is simple: WORD/PLAY celebrates and interrogates the word choices that shape narratives, whether that be in the form of poems, stories, songs, or other media. What made Sylvia Plath so emblematic of confessional poetry, and isn’t all poetry confessional anyway? What does Normani mean by “booty on bubonic” in her latest single, “Candy Paint”? Why does Blizzard Entertainment not know how to write a good narrative for Sylvanas Windrunner anymore? Why are stupid puns so addictive to me even though I am usually allergic to cringe? Maybe I’ll be a rebel and muse in other ways, too. Remember: I’m embracing the not-knowing!
I hope you’ll read along and embrace it with me, too.