Commoners’ Corner

Your greatest adversary is the perception of your own self worth. This enemy of the self having been fed for years by the cruelty of your peers, of a strangers demeaning glance, and from trolls who throw stones off superficially high bridges.

Whenever I contemplate my own writing, my mind wanders back to a distant memory. The school bus where my peers had been passing around a sheet of paper. Howling with laughter, they passed around a poem, reading it aloud while screeching slurs I would never want to parrot. The author of the poem was sinking so low, cradling into himself, I thought he might actually vanish into the dark beneath his seat.

The way they had emotionally eviscerated his worth still haunts the reflections of my childhood. As a result of his torment, I have never written a poem and I probably never will. I wonder how many others that day had decided to never write artfully because the risk of predation became greater than the reward of emotional release.

This poem is cringy.

Your writing is too pretentious.

This trope is overdone.

Your prose is too purple.

There’s more plot holes than Swiss cheese.

We are often balancing a delicate line between receiving constructive critiques or destructive condemnations of our work. We’re often left alone to mend the wounds of our own self esteem, careful not to inflate the ego, because god forbid you believe you are better than what you are now.

Eliminate the false barricades of your self worth. You can not reach the high ground with the arbitrary walls you have placed around yourself. When you finally climb above, do not look down with disdain toward others who are struggling in the pit you had just defeated. Offer a hand and lift them beside you. Practice the discipline of unconditional love in your surroundings and your community.

I can only judge in the place of a layman; a commoner; a literary peasant. I am no better than you or anyone else. There is no writer, no artist, no author I have placed as the authority of what is good or what is bad. The bar does not exist.

Just keep fucking writing. Never let insignificance stunt your growth, or else you may grow with overwhelming regret.