z

Young Writers Society


16+

Losing dignity

by ninachroscicka


Warning: This work has been rated 16+.

We are all familiar with feeling - waking up wasted, not knowing precisely where we are the very moment and the worst part is a random guy sleeping next to you. For a brief moment you close your eyes and try to recall what the hell has happened last night. Then you realize that no matter how hard you try, you won’t recall much apart from getting into the club, having few shots, blank, having those crazy eyes seeking for attention, blank, bouncing from wall to wall, pretend to be standing straight, blank, getting into the cab with the first guy that called you beautiful, blank. The only thing you can think of is WHERE THE FUCK IS MY MIND. You repeat this phrase over and over again until you can hear The Pixies singing your personal anthem of shame. Suddenly, you feel this rush of epithets naming yourself a stupid idiot, pathetic attention-seeker, but hey, there is one more thing to check, probably the worst one - the list of all the people you have been calling at five in the morning to remind them what fools they are to reciprocate your love. You want to put being you all those monologues of how your ex-crushes don’t deserve you, you get up as quietly as possible, search for your clothes, grab your stuff and leave. Going down the stairs you can feel like your head is about to explode for two reasons: you’ve got a hangover killing you in every possible way - your head feels like a bomb which is about to be detonated and in one moment you’ve got this rush of thoughts in your head, trying to put together fragments of last night again as if it was a jigsaw puzzle and you are not smart enough to have it completed. As the door open, you feel a sudden light breeze on your cheeks, blowing away most of the stings of remorse, all your emotions are fading, and you are calming down. You pick up a lighter, smoke a cigarette and suddenly there is silence, all thoughts disappear. You manage to order a cab to take you home and here comes probably the best part of the day : a shower which somehow makes you feel less guilty as if you have washed out all of the things that don’t make you proud of yourself . As the time is passing by hangover is becoming lighter and lighter and then it disappears. Now comes the time for conscience check. Your reliable friends told you in detail all the things you did last night. Now the jigsaw puzzle is complete. It doesn’t really matter from which side you would look at it, you lost your dignity and there is nothing much for you to do. All the self-respect and the sense of pride are lost. What can one say, you got yourself wasted, did loads of things you wish had never happened, said things you shouldn’t have said, lost control over your body and your mind. The worst thing is that alcohol and drugs made you vulnerable, enabled you to show all feelings you have been hiding deep inside for a long time, expose yourself in the most pathetic possible way. The thing is, realizing that, all the things that mattered a while ago have lost their purport, and the thing that scares you the most is the realization that you have exposed yourself to people who would never otherwise say hello to, showing your surging emotions, simple, almost primitive. For this brief moment, they could read you like an open book. You were weak and needy, the opposite of the person you’ve been playing for a long time, the person you wanted to convince yourself you indeed are. It is said that after a while fake becomes real, but this time it didn’t. Despite all the circumstances for once you’ve been real.


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303 Reviews


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Sun Mar 31, 2013 2:04 pm
StoneHeart wrote a review...



I know people like this person. People who live their lives like this, night after night, day after day. Actually, to tell the truth, most people down in this dinky little country that I live in would do it in a moment!

Really, sooooo many people live like this! They're running from life, their past, depression, or any number of other things! (note however that I am not one of these people in any way at all).

You portray these people very, very well! The way they think, the way they act!

Really, they're pretty hopeless causes, and you give that impression!

As far as your writing goes, you have a number of grammar mistakes, I'd highly advise you to get a nit-picker like LouisCypher or Rydia to go over it and weed them out for you!

Also, this here is, if you noticed, one monstrous paragraph! That doesn't exactly work, at all. You need to toss in more periods and break it waaaaaay down, it needs to go down to something more easily read.

But, besides the grammar and massive paragraph, then this is good. You portray your point well, though it's a bit hard to see EXACTLY what your point is.

Good work & Keep writing!

~Black~




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Sun Mar 24, 2013 9:35 am
Hannah wrote a review...



Okay. The thing is that I would do none of these things. Maybe it's just personal taste, but I don't think that second person direct address is very effective through action scenes. Especially, maybe, when it's clear that it's just a substitute for I.

I think something that would be good to examine (something I can't know) would be what things you wrote differently because you were writing in second person, that you would maybe not have written if you'd written in first. I think maybe some benefit came from being able to mentally separate yourself from the experience, but in a final form I'm not sure this address will work.

The reason is, I think, it's hard to direct someone through an emotional realization. For example, in poetry, we can guide people to emotional realizations by leaving visceral and vital clues that will naturally bring them to that emotion. But rarely is that accomplished by directing. People like to come to conclusions on their own and rarely like being told what they feel. So, when the topic of this piece is an emotional realization, it's hard to pull off.

Another problem I had was that a lot of this seemed very vague. I loved especially the moment when she/he's at the door and feels the wind on her face -- that's very physical, specific, and vivid. It brings the moment to life, where the rest of the philosophical contemplation is very internal and harder to grasp. Paired with action, you can pull it off, but you have to be specific to make the action vivid, concrete, and grasp-able. haha

Lastly, a big general thing, is that I don't feel connected to the emotional revelation. What does real mean? What does fake mean? Where did this speaker get his/her concepts of those definitions and what would have prompted her to go against what she didn't want in the first place? An examination of that beginning stage would make this break more vivid. Instead we just have a break and nothing to compare it with.

PM me if you have any questions or comments, please.
Good luck and keep writing!




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Wed Mar 20, 2013 11:40 pm



no that snever happened





Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.
— Emily Dickenson