How To Write

I found something that I wrote my senior year of high school. It was for the empathy project. During the empathy project we would talk with another person in lit class about a certain topic (love, education, friends, gender, etc.), and today I was looking through them and I found mine from the day we talked about writing. Here is an excerpt I enjoyed:
I hated memoir. I had a juvenile animosity towards it. I had my own life, why would I ever want to read about someone else’s? All of my hatred was entirely because I was eleven years old and had nothing to write about. Of course this changed by the time I was thirteen or fourteen. I discovered the shit headed joy of writing figurative self-mutilation. Writing is for escaping and writing is for continuously sticking a nail through your foot. Really writing memoir is the most masochistic thing anyone could ever do. I was depressed. Then I wrote about being depressed. Then I revised being depressed, and so by that time I have lived through depression four times around and I don’t like what I’ve written anymore, because I’m so depressed I’ve lost my self esteem.
Clearly the right answer at that point would have been to start a journal about my depraved feelings, but sometimes I needed a break. That’s when you start playing solitaire. Solitaire is the best thing in life. It’s great because now they have multiple types of solitaire. There’s regular solitaire, but you can go the easy route and draw one card at a time or you can be adventurous and do the three card draw. The three-card draw is a risky one, especially when you are in an emotionally fragile state of mind, which you probably are after writing. When I was fourteen I discovered Spider Solitaire. The amazing thing about Spider Solitaire is that there are three different levels, so that once you have mastered one level you can move up to the nest one. I am still on the middle level. Spider Solitaire is a never-ending challenge.