Fairy tale.

Once a very long time ago, when I was the editor of my high school's literary magazine (pretentious enough for you? Wait for it -- I went to a private boarding school. We shat pretension), I used to be a writer. A creative one, at that. I used to have talent I took for granted. If I reached far enough, stared at the page long enough, avoided the dorm mother by writing under the covers with a little light, then voila! Something decent that other people seemed to find meaning and occasionally brilliance in, something I wouldn't mind other human eyes seeing.

And then...

It went away. I went to college; decided I'd never be able to afford sparkly jewellery and leather handbags writing poetry and short fiction. Too unstable! Too precarious! Too much uncertainty! And it wasn't even my parents playing a subliminal tape in the background is the real tragedy. Have I mentioned I'm a pragmatic coward?

So I went into journalism and discovered fact-checking sucks and no one gets literary license and maybe my particular sense of humor doesn't always, always translate well. So then there was English Literature. Because those who can't, analyze.

And then...

One day I picked up a pen and thought: "I will write a poem!" And it was terrible. Truly, in all ways, execrable. Tried too hard, no lyricism, no ease, no beauty, no higher truth. Just effort and cliche and obvious-ness. Putting it down, tucking it away from those human eyes, didn't make it any better when I went back to it a little a later. Was just bad, bad, bad, bad.

And so I decided to be Indiana Jones.

And then...

That's when I realized I had let the Muse die. Just suffocated him/her/it with a plastic bag smelling of onions and kicked it a little in the metaphorical ribs with steel-toe boots and that talent I had so smugly relied on? Comeuppance is a bitch.

And now...

I'm in the process of my doctorate in psychology. How the hell did I end up here? I'm in charge of people's well being and psyches and my own is so bruised, battered and suffocated. Does that make me a better therapist? Or well on the way to being a psycho-therapist? Have I really stumbled upon a universal truth that those who can't, analyze?

Maybe the muse was suffocated with self-awareness.