no words left.

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis's comments on them, and burned them.

- Possession, A. S. Byatt

Blackadder is fictional, but F. R Leavis and the horrible, discouraging truth of studying English at any sort of tertiary level is all too real.

Once upon a time, before I started university, I wanted to write so, so badly. I was convinced that I was born to be a writer, I made up endless stories in my head (still do, in fact) and invented worlds for my characters to inhabit. As I grew older, I tried to ignore the fact that I was a horrible oral storyteller -- my jokes fell flat a lot of the time because I'd timed the punchline wrongly, or was too obsessed with background details to make the story entertaining to people other than myself.

And then after my A Levels, when I suddenly had some free time to write, I found that I could not. The words just weren't coming to me. A short stint in a publishing company showed me just how cutthroat and money-driven the entire publishing business is, so that was that. In university I quickly found out that my writing skills were woefully inadequate, and while I could let my feelings wash over me as I sat on a bench on a perfect summer's day, I simply could not put it into words.

If anything, my mind thinks more in visual terms now, rather than literary. Even when I want to write my own stories down, I find that I just don't have the words. I have images in my head now, not stories. I could probably shoot a movie for whatever I want, but I can't write a proper story out any more. In effect, I was a fraud. I couldn't do what I used to think was my forte. And in some respects, that fact scares me more than graduating and having to face the real working world. If it's anything that my degree has taught me, is that I'm just Not Good Enough to inhabit the academic world where I once thought I belonged in.

That may very well be the fact why I don't write much in this blog any more. I have another blog for more frivolous things, but this one was always meant for actual deep musings. It's not that I don't have these musings any more, it's just that I lost my words.

I only found out about this a few months ago while I was filling out MA applications and going through all of my work at university. The shock hit me so acutely that it stalled my sending in the applications by at least two months. That deep, gaping wound in my sense of self-worth is still raw, oh-so-very-raw. I think I'm only just beginning to recover from it, but I fear it may take years for the scab to cover, to protect, to heal, and then fall off.

(And yet, somehow I can't shake the feeling I might make a difference to the human race.)