My kid with her light saber. The camera does that to the shot when she moves.Yesterday, I ran into someone I hadn't seen in years, one of the few people of my past who had some positive effect on me. This person showed me a way to focus my out of control energy into writing and away from the indiscriminate self-hate crimes my energy had previously been engaged in. They were so talented and when they said I was "raw" talent, I wanted to believe them. Self-hate being what it is, no matter how good I got, I thought they were better. No matter how distinct my own voice, it wasn't theirs so not good enough. That's part of why I stopped trying to write at all. Nothing I ever had to say would ever be said as well as they could say it.
Time and circumstance later and we stopped spending time together. Contributing other factors, and I stopped blogging at all for a while. Mutual friends meant I thought of them every once in a while, but not much until yesterday afternoon when I happened on something they had written not too long ago.
I wasn't more than a paragraph into it when I realized that what I was reading was nearly verbatim something I had written myself some years ago. While it's different enough (and the idea behind it common enough) that I stop short of claims of plagiarism, it's clear that most of that piece of their work was directly influenced by what and how I wrote it years before. With the exception of grammar and syntax, not a single word they wrote was written better than the way I did it years before.
My first thought (and many of the subsequent ones) was "you fucking shit." Why would someone so incredibly talented bother to rip me off? Then it hit me: someone so incredibly talented ripped me off. When they ran out of ideas, they came back to one of mine. I guess that means I'm not raw, anymore. Maybe I'm ripe, now.
Such is the way people fall off their pedestals. It's like watching someone very fat, holding a full plate, slip and fall in the buffet line of a busy, trendy restaurant. No matter what stupid thing you said or did earlier in the day, it wasn't nearly as bad as that was. And it always makes you feel prettier and thinner than you did before they fell.
