Dave was big and friendly. I’d met him my freshman year of high school, after my family moved to Illinois. Two years earlier, my family had moved from New Jersey to the suburbs of Chicago, and I’d been forced to make new friends. Then, for reasons I don’t really remember, my parents decided I should go to a high school that none of my grade school friends were going to- including a girl who I really though I liked. I was forced to remake all my friends for the second year in a row.
I probably wouldn’t have met Dave if it weren’t for his excellent, outgoing personality. I was sitting alone in graphics and design class when he first approached me, and asked me if I played Magic cards- something he’d asked everyone the first day of school. I didn’t know much about Magic, but I pretended to be a fan because I was lonely. Immediately, we hit it off.
At the time, we were both kind of outcasts. I was new, and had a speech impediment that made it impossible for me to tell people things like what town I was from. Dave had been around for awhile, but was overweight and definitely self-conscious about it. As the year progressed, we learned that we shared a plethora of nerdy interests.
We talked about videogames, rock bands and girls, and complained about why girls weren’t paying attention to us. Then, one day Dave met the girl of his dreams.
To put it nicely, the girl was out of our leagues. She was cute, and had the dark, gothic metal-chick edge that made the combo of our nerdy-ness and puberty go crazy. Dave talked to her quite a bit more than I did- at that point, I was still too nervous about my own speaking to do any talking myself.
I lived vicariously through the conversations Dave would have with her. As expected, things weren’t going well for him by way of a relationship. But Dave did tell me the short lists of things that this girl was attracted to- she’d told him, apparently, meaning he asked. They were: “Awkward” guys, guys who “had problems,” guys who were “punk,” and guys who had “been through things.”
Poor Dave. She was giving him the roundabout, telling him she liked guys who fit impossible descriptions when the honest her would have said “guys that I look at and am attracted to because they’re good looking and don’t treat me like crap.”
Unfortunately for Dave, his conversations with her led him to a whole new level of rigorous soul-searching. He decided that he needed to be that guy who “had problems” and “been through things.” A day later, he confessed to me that he was thinking about trying marijuana, and that he didn’t believe in god anymore. He also confessed to me that he always “thought” he “might have been abused when he was younger.”
Dave just wasn’t getting it. He and I were already the social misfits of high school, but he was driving himself nuts trying to figure out why he wasn’t “different” and “edgy” enough for this particular girl. She didn’t really want that, but for some reason he couldn’t fathom, it’s what he thought he needed to be.
As someone who aspires to be a writer-of-sorts, I constantly find myself in trying to fill the same shoes Dave was trying to fill. All writers seem to have that in common- we feel that we have a “voice” and that there’s something we should be saying, but all-to-often our own experience doesn’t seem to do much in the way for our “being distinct.” And, of course, to be different is to be noticed.
Other writers have been through pain they don’t need to invent:
When I was younger, my best friend's dad had a drinking problem. Though he was never hit by his dad, he constantly felt like he was being verbally abused, unable to meet the expectations of that person. Resentment for his father grew and grew, until he dropped out of college and moved out of the house at the age of nineteen.
Though their relationship is now probably better than it's ever been, his perception of his father has traditionally been a negative one. He sees his father as a unfaithful boozer, an opportunist, an abuser and is tormented by his memory of him daily.
I see his father as I see my own, an imperfect, old fashioned human being who has made tons of mistakes, but nearly always attempts to do the “right thing” if not right away then at least eventually.
Sometimes, though, I feel that I should dig up his or some other poor soul's torment, and make it my own. Sometimes, I feel that if I had a little bit more sensational of a life than my own real experience, I’d have a better shot at being a writer. Or I’d have a better shot if I did something interesting, like joined the army. That’d definitely make my voice more interesting.
By the time I made it to college, though, I’d given up on the dream of being the most interested man in the world. Larger than life adventures and deep-seeded psychological problem ceased to be what I wanted to write or hear about. I turned to Journalism, because that’s what described real people, living real honest life.
I started writing for the independent paper- the real “objective voice of the students.” The paper that was designed and created to be an alternative to the school’s newsletter and the Communication department’s paper. The paper was about what the students were all about. My kind of paper, you know?
But even during my short tenure there I had problems. When the election system our student government uses broke down, I hesitantly stood by as the paper printed as its front page headline (with semantic accuracy only obtainable by English majors) “Student Org fixes Election,” “fixes” being the keyword. Things like that were happening every issue, too. Then, it was becoming harder and harder for me to get published. The editors kept telling me that my stories “weren’t interesting enough” and that I should write about other things, like the protest that the faculty union was having. Issue by issue, my articles weren’t making it while the ones that pushed the limit were. I was supposed to be a Muckraker, or nothing at all.
I’m leaving college now, my creative writing degree in tow. After four years, I still haven’t found my voice, or what makes me distinct, or how I’m going to find something to entertain the world of readers. It seems more and more like although everyone likes talking guys like Dave, no one really wants to be with them.
