a poet's lonely dreams

wattpad gives me anxiety (ranting sorry)

I used to love this place. I still do. 

Here is where I made friends, I found love

And I grew.

One of the original shitposters:

I thought my poetry was so fucking amazing.

I would gawk, and brag, point out to strangers 

who neither knew nor cared about me, that I had

SIXTY THOUSAND READS and

how my poetry was living, moving, breathing

proof that I am actually somebody in this world.

Gosh. What a noob.

Wattpad gives me anxiety now. The whole machine is different.

There's advertisements, and like 200+ notifications that have nothing

to do with my unread messages or the books that I have read/written. 

The once wise ambassadors are bots, the new poets are scrubs,

the old million-reader-giants who I used to praise aren't even special

anymore. I remember going to Barnes and Nobles around five years ago,

when I was 15, and seeing this book published with a Wattpad logo and

feeling so swollen with admiration and a newfound sense of purpose while

thinking, someone from our little family actually made something of their

weird werewolf and one direction fanfictions and cringey angsty poetry and

will one day sit at a table with Oscar Wilde, Stephen King, and JK Rowling.

How naive. Now Wattpad gives me anxiety. Surely because I used to think

this place would lead me somewhere, but the only thing Wattpad ever does

for me is lead me back to years of shitty poetry, horribly gay stories, strange

fictions I began but never finished. Reminds me of my age of delusions, visions

of obscene grandeur and unnecessary efforts at affection towards strangers who

did not and will not read my works (no matter how many annoyingly unthoughtful

comments I left under their works).

I really "dated" a guy on here when I was 13 whose name was fucking Albino-Lion-Monster-Ha. 

Like, someone start digging my fucking grave. Now. If you're an oldie of Wattpad, knee deep

in their 20th year, do you remember that rush of coming home from freshman year of high

school to jump on this website and just live? Read for hours Harry Styles fanfictions, gay books

about boys going camping, short stories about horror, and all the fucking poetry in the universe?

How legit awesome was that?  GOD! To be young and go back to THAT era of innocence.

 Now, if I am caught writing poetry or stories, it is somewhere messily in a google doc scattered across tons of "collecitons" of poetry, and disorderly tucked in stockpiles of scattered short stories with awful labeling and unclear distinctions of plotlines and scene logs. 

UGH! Why does Wattpad frighten me so much now? Why am I so scared to commit? Why is it so hard to publish any of the good things that I think I am proud of?

Maybe I am scared of the truth about my current state of writing? Maybe I am a dumb*ss who needs  to shut the f*ck up and just post? Okay, well. Whatever I do, this is the beginning of me attempting to court this site again. I am going to amass a big following and make whoever reads whatever **serious** works I post, SWOON. Ya hear me? Else I'm gonna have to die trying. Which. At this point. After trying my hand at performing poetry, and telling anyone who will listen that I will be seriously published someday but not even putting in half of the work at successfully getting published, dying wouldn't do shit but immortalize my work to some extent.