MysticalSassmachine's avatar
Nuh-uh!You're just being humble. Also, having an inferiority complex will not do you any good. I mean, there will always be that one person who's better at something, but hey. They will not have the same stamina, the same story or the same personality as you. In other words, there is just one of you, and you should be proud of whatever work you produce because it will be one of a kind forever and ever. :3
GileadsBalm's avatar
And you're just far too nice for your own good. I think that feeling inferior every now and then is probably a good thing. Knowing that there's more path ahead motivates you to keep walking.
But I like what you're saying about individuality. Makes me feel like maybe there's a purpose to all of this xD
MysticalSassmachine's avatar
Well, no. Feeling inferior will only make you feel... Inferior no matter how wonderful the art is. However, feeling like there are some things to improve upon and working hard to fix particular issues-- now that's what will keep you going.
And of course there is a purpose to "all of this". Someone somewhere might be reading your poetry and they might completely change that person's life! You will never know this, of course, but that's the thrill of it. We are all connected and all of our choices, decision, and actions have an impact both to those around us and the ones that are completely out of our reach. It's the butterfly effect alive and in action. :D
...:giggle: Sorry, I tend to stray from the topic at hand a lot. I talk a lot as well, sooo. o///O My sincerest apologies.
GileadsBalm's avatar
You should talk more, I love listening. reading, I guess... whatever You're also very intelligent, I can see, which is definitely another plus.

I suppose your right. It's a small price to pay though, a little self-deprecation leads to a lot of self-improvement. I find that I'm at my worst when I have the highest opinion of myself, and at my best when my ego has been flattened. When I tell myself my poetry is bad I keep searching for better words, but when I am satisfied my confidence betrays me. It's the same for so many different aspects of my life. I argue too much when I think I am right, but when I tell myself that I'm wrong I listen. If I tell myself that I'm mean I overcompensate with kindness. The more I think I'm lazy the more motivated I am to work. Insults keep me humble. Low self-esteem makes me strong.
I'm actually reworking the poem that this conversation started on because of how absolutely blown away I was by a few lines of Alexander Pope.

I'm a fan of chaos theory ^.^ And I definitely hope someday to change peoples' lives.
MysticalSassmachine's avatar
Oh, you really shouldn't encourage me to talk more, because I will never ever stop, and you will have to pry my fingers off my keyboard and lock me up in a cage just to stop me from typing my thoughts (which really aren't as intelligent as you might believe, by the way).
I find it fascinating how you think that putting yourself down will make you produce better work and make you a better person. I think you should love yourself more, because if you love yourself first, then it is so much easier to be kinder, to understand and to listen to the people around you. But that's only what I think. And what I think sometimes is wrong and completely unrelated. :3
What you're saying makes a little bit of sense, although it shouldn't be so. Low self-esteem is bad, bad, bad...! >__< You should try writing things when you are more at peace with yourself. o.O I am really curious as to how that will work out. :giggle:
GileadsBalm's avatar
And yet you can just spitfire full paragraphs of coherent thought. It usually takes me awhile to write anything meaningful, not to mention that I proofread ever sentence I write several times. I won't, however, have you putting yourself down in your own writing. Even if the irony is a little amusing You are very intelligent. My friends all go to top notch liberal arts universities and it never occurs to them to introspect as you just did.

They do say that one must suffer for one's art. Although, that's not my writing method. Except for lines that come to me very quickly which are fairly rare, and never any good I spend long amounts of time reworking the words and lines I write. Usually over months, occasionally years. I think I started writing this poem two years ago at my summer camp. So my mood when I write is just whatever mood I happen to be in when I feel like thinking about my poetry, which varies each time.

I am, as silly as it sounds, learning to love myself for the exact reason you're telling me. For me, that's always been one of those proverbs that you hear but don't listen to. They're everywhere. The best things in life are free, it's better to have loved and lost, forgive and forget. It's so easy to hear something repeated so many times without ever thinking about it, but eventually you realize that people repeat the advice for a reason. When you actually sit down and try to absorb these ideas you realize how important they truly are. To a certain extent, my low self-esteem keeps me in check, but I used to push my own self-loathing to extremely unhealthy levels. This was never necessary, and I know that now. I take better care of myself because I can't serve others unless I am able to serve myself.
MysticalSassmachine's avatar
I find proof-reading annoying because (in my cases)... It just strips the original thought out of its meaning in order to make it sound pleasing and more refined to the reader, or anyone who really cares. Q^Q Unless, of course, you're really good at it. That's why most of my proof-reading is done by someone else... If I ever do work up enough guts to let someone I know read my stuff xD
Oh, we're not speaking about the level of my intelligence~! I will try my hardest to stay on topic this time because this conversation is very eye- opening.
But why do your poems flow so beautifully if each and every line you write had their own mood and atmosphere? D: It's so wonderfully strange. I haven't heard of anyone that uses this techinque (which stresses my point about individuality... I feel like I'm running in circles here. Focus, Nami, focus >.<)

You have no idea, though, how glad I am to hear that you are learning to love yourself. :3 I cannot count how many times I have given the "Love yourself before you love anyone else" advice during my time in this fickle universe, and I do realize that it's very very cliche. But as you said, there are many reasons why these advices are repeated. We don't listen to them because we assume that we are following them. But we're really not. We tell them to other people, yes, and then they listen. But we seem to forget to mention it to ourselves because we rely a tiddly bit too much on other people to tell us what we really are. We shouldn't need other people to shape our personalities... Yes, they can affect how it will turn out, but we should not rely on other people to tell us what we are, how great or how terrible we are. Ultimately, we are the ones to decide our own personality. The amount of love we have for ourselves. The amount of appreciation and care. n.n
P.S. iunno if I made any sense there xD Oopsies.
GileadsBalm's avatar
Hmmm, maybe I would proofread less if I felt that my original text had any meaning in the first place. I've read my consciousness streamed out on a paper and it looks like something made by Google Translate. I tend to write one word when I mean another, skip words that my mind forgets are necessary for context, and sometimes leave out essential words entirely.
Proofreading is also nice for reflection. I look at my sentences and see if there are better ways to organize my thoughts. Maybe one word looks better in this line. Perhaps I could be less repetitive. There are so many factors that affect good writing. Paragraphs sound better with varied sentences. Maybe you noticed that this paragraph has become dull. Every sentence I'm writing is now so simple. They are all about the same length. They all follow the same pattern. Without some variation in the length of sentences, prose becomes so tedious to read. However, if allowed little variation, the sentences spring back to life. There are little things one can do that add some spice to the writing. Prescriptive grammar gives names for all these things; prepositional phrases, subordinate clauses, simple/compound/complex sentences, but if you write and read enough you can start to feel them. Truly beautiful prose has mastered this readability, and the best writers would probably have trouble not writing so well. But, like all things, it gets better with practice. Proofreading gives me a chance to see how I'm doing.

To a certain extent you have to strip the thought from its original context. I don't think strictly in English, and my thoughts rarely confine themselves to grammatical rules. They exist as a combination of feelings, perception, imagination, and ideas that I have to wrestle down into words if I plan to communicate them. Words are like little boxes. I can't directly communicate to you exactly what's in my head, so I stuff my thoughts into words and ship them to you. The only problem is that when you open the box it's not the same thing that I put in. I had to cram the idea into that box, and it changed shape because of that, the pathetic mail service dropped it several times on it's way to your doorstep, and when you opened it, the idea changed again. The way I interpret things depends on the way I think, my own experiences, thoughts, feelings, etc., and the way you think depends on those things as well. So the trick is knowing how much to refine your writing for the reader. You want to maintain as much of the original thought as possible, but make sure it's something that the other person will understand.

Don't worry about staying on topic, that's what the paragraph separations are for ^.^ We can have several conversations all at once, and I don't want you to limit your thought based on what you think I want to hear.

Haha, you're so nice. I think, to a certain extent, it's the time I put into some of my poetry. Raven on a Silent Shore probably took around 30 or 40 hours of thinking, scribbling, rewriting and rewording before I got it to this point. Sometimes it's the form. This poem is also trochaic or iambic, depending on how you look at it, so it alternates between stressed and unstressed syllables. That gives it a certain rhythm which separates it from a lot of other poetry.

You are so insightful and I agree wholeheartedly. You make perfect sense, I hope someday to be so wise.
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