The Muse is a Narcissist
By: Malaika Cheney-Coker
Tags: Self Improvement, Inspiration, Narcissism, Creativity, Writing

Writing takes and then takes some more

At first, I wrote because I was required to — at school, and later, at work. Along with that, were the poems I scratched out as an insignificant childhood pastime, or in the foment of young adulthood. But there were also those heady early years that I thought to try my hand at fiction, at building a world, momentarily glimpsed and threadbare though it may be, from nothing but words. Most of the time it felt like a trapeze act without the skill to catch the next swinging bar and a fall to the hard earth inevitable. This foolhardiness was induced by love — of the journey and its possibilities — but it was love on my terms. The laptop could be opened and closed at will, the world building could wait on the margins of conscious life, like a nighttime dream shaken off upon waking.

Over the years the making of tales became a craft to master, a task that, as the experts in any craft will tell us, requires a mechanical fidelity to practice. Like learning a language, which presents a compendium of challenges (mastering verbs, pronunciation, unfamiliar tenses, etc.), I found that writing as a craft was one large Christmas stocking generously stocked with coal. Learning to effectively write prose, or execute arc and pacing, or weave in theme would be formidable as separate challenges. Using them skillfully in combination — well, that was an accomplishment that eluded all but the writing elite, and I felt woefully remote from that class. So I took solace in my resentment of the difficulty of the task and the sheer psychological stamina it required.

I also began to resent the time the craft stole from other things. It consumed leisure time and demanded obeisance. It competed with friendships. It became a jealous lover. I humored it. Wooed it in hopes of being knighted with mastery of it. Gave it time and granted it my mind and thoughts. But I could never fully yield to it. Not while there was other demanding work to do that paid the bills. Not when there was family to tend. While all these remained, I needed to break free from writing whenever I wanted to — and I could. So even the world in my most lengthy endeavor at fiction was like a snow globe, real in its own sphere, rendered with earnest attention, but static, until I deigned to shake it.

Slowly writing came to demand even more. It was an addiction to be fed, slowly opening its cavernous maw. Long periods of time spent away from actively writing left me unmoored and bloated with unspent expression. I became envious of those who were able to give themselves wholly to their artistic endeavor. Sure, I wasn’t about to risk all to become a starving artist, but I perceived more keenly the siren song of that sacrifice.

Call it imaginative excess or an overwrought personification, but writing began to lift off the page in my mind, its multidimensional wiliness becoming to me that of another sentient being. And it was a dangerous being at that. It was a narcissist, a hungry beast that wanted not just to drain me but to possess me. It wanted nothing less than the code to the software that was my being. It wanted me to reveal thoughts and views that anyone is entitled to hold private — all for its glory. It demanded that I write always or else languish.

Anyone familiar with dealing with a true narcissist of pathological proportions is familiar with how they subtly subvert your will to theirs, violate the boundaries between you and them, in order to subsume your personhood in theirs. This is what writing can do. Like some carnivorous flower, its embryo will devour the seed that is you. And it will leave you with the stark lesson that having endured the rigors of craft building, a new kind of mastery is required — that of reaching into a new way to BE. To live raw and quivering like an egg spilled from a broken shell. To be radiant in shameless victimhood, the boundaries between self and muse erased as though they never existed. To draw nectar from this inglorious subjugation and distill it like wine. And, to glisten with creativity, brimming with life as never before.