I Don’t Belong Here

(Authors Note: I don’t know that this is really a story. Maybe it’s an essay? Maybe I’ll try again as what I think I’ve created here is a ramble. I started with the prompt and this is what spilled out)

I don’t belong here. I don’t deserve to stand shoulder to shoulder with the literary giants who’ve carved their names into the stone of history with words that dance across the page like a lover’s whisper or a warrior’s cry. They’ve built cathedrals of prose, their sentences towering spires, their stories breathing life into the mundane. Ordinary people living extraordinarily, a chipped teacup transformed into a relic of heartbreak, a dusty road into a pilgrimage. I’m no architect of such wonderous beauty. I’m a talentless hack, a fraud fumbling at a keyboard, splattering garbled gook onto a screen that glows with cold, artificial light. Not even paper. Paper, at least, has some soul.

There was a time when writing meant something tangible, when words were etched onto the pulped remains of trees felled by men who embodied a kind of primal strength. These were real men, their brows slick with sweat, their hands callused from swinging axes forged in fire and grit. Muscles rippled in places modern bodies have forgotten, honed not in air-conditioned gyms with neon-lit mirrors, but in forests and foundries where the air was thick with sawdust and molten steel. They worked in conditions that would break most men today, sweltering, soot-covered, their lungs heavy with the weight of labor. They’d come home at dusk, black smudges on their faces like war paint, and kiss their wives, who saw in them not just men but providers, pillars of a world built on sacrifice. Their sons watched with wide eyes, awestruck by fathers who feared nothing more than failing their families. These men didn’t need podcasts or protein shakes to prove their worth. They grew their food, raised their livestock, and built their lives with their hands. What they produced was real, solid, enduring.

Paper was their legacy, a physical thing you could hold, its edges sharp enough to draw blood. The words of the greats; Hemingway, Woolf, Faulkner, sat on your nightstand like sentinels, guarding your dreams with their weight. Gargoyles of idioms and phrases, their ink a kind of magic that held the world together. Now? It’s all bits and bytes, pixels on a screen, interrupted by pop-up ads for penile enlargement or weight-loss pills, algorithms preying on your insecurities like vultures. The sacred act of creation has been reduced to a sterile transaction, a soulless dance of ones and zeros. It’s unnatural. Unhealthy. A mockery of what writing once was.

I’m no better than the screen I stare at. I have no formal education beyond the public school system, those gray, fluorescent-lit classrooms where children are herded like cattle, trained to obey bells and clocks. We were molded into soulless factory workers; our creativity leached away by dress codes and standardized tests. The teachers, bless them, tried, but they were shackled to curriculums designed to churn out compliance, not poets. Sentence structure? Dialogue? Punctuation? I know just enough to know I know nothing. My understanding of grammar could maybe fill a thimble, and even that feels generous. I don’t write. I vomit words. My limited vocabulary spills onto the screen like the clumsy fumbling of a blind drunkard, my fingers poking at keys with all the grace of a toddler wielding a fat crayon. Story arcs? Character development? I wouldn’t know a narrative structure if it slapped me across the face. I can’t conjugate a verb to save my life.

My mind is a constipated mess, straining to push words through the fog of my inadequacies. Type, read, delete. Type, read, delete. Over and over, a torturous cycle until something, anything, sticks. The sentences that survive are the leftovers of my thoughts, half-digested scraps that somehow escape the jaws of my insecurities. I’m no craftsman. I’m a scavenger, picking through the wreckage of my own mind for something worth keeping.

I sit at a desk that’s not even wood, just pressed sawdust and plastic, a soulless product of mass production. Machines built it, not men. Robots laid the paint, their precision a far cry an Asimov creation. It mocks me, its smooth surface reflecting my own shortcomings. Some days, it takes me hours to produce a single sentence that doesn’t make me cringe. King says to write two thousand words a day. Two thousand! The man’s a lunatic. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are my paragraphs. I’m lucky if I get a hundred words out before the self-doubt creeps in, whispering that I’m wasting my time, that I’ll never belong.

I’m a product of Generation X, that strange, in-between generation raised on the fumes of a world that no longer exists. We were fed a steady diet of cinematic dreams, Spielberg and Hughes telling us we could be anything, do anything. Our parents were too busy to notice. Our fathers were chasing midlife crises, scheduling trysts with secretaries or burying themselves in work to avoid the void of their own unraveling marriages. Our mothers were stepping into the workforce, not just for empowerment but because divorce had become as inevitable as death and taxes. We raised ourselves, latchkey kids with bicycles for freedom and breakfast cereal for sustenance. Saturday mornings were sacred, spent sprawled in front of the TV, watching cartoons while the world outside moved on without us. We weren’t marching for civil rights or dodging drafts. We had no Woodstock, no Great Depression, no famine to forge us into something resilient. Our war was a cold one, a shadow conflict with Russia that never boiled over into anything worth writing about. Nobody wants to read a novel about how we didn’t get nuked.

The biggest crises of my generation were manufactured, media-fueled panics. The war on drugs wasn’t about the drugs themselves but the spectacle of it, D.A.R.E. programs and “Just Say No” slogans that felt more like propaganda than salvation. AIDS was our plague, but instead of compassion, it became a tool to shame and blame. Homosexuals were dying, and the narrative was “it’s your fault.” How creative. How utterly devoid of humanity. We didn’t rise up or fight back. We just watched, our soft bodies sinking deeper into couches, our eyes glazed over by MTV and blockbuster movies. We outsourced the hard work; logging, manufacturing, steel-forging, to distant shores, trading calluses for keyboards, sweat for screen time. Our entertainment became our identity, our rebellion a montage of music videos and coming-of-age films.

What do I have to offer in the shadow of literary titans? They wrote of wars and revolutions, of love that shattered and rebuilt worlds. I have no grand battles to chronicle, no sweeping romances to immortalize. My generation’s stories are small, drowned out by the noise of a world that’s moved on to newer, shinier distractions. I’m not Hemingway, crafting sparse, devastating truths from the ashes of war. I’m not Morrison, weaving tapestries of pain and resilience. I’m just me, a middle-aged nobody with a laptop, trying to make sense of a life that feels too ordinary to matter.

Yet here I am, still typing. Still deleting. Still trying. Maybe that’s the only thing I share with the greats, not talent, not brilliance, but stubbornness. The refusal to quit, even when every word feels like a betrayal of the craft. I don’t belong here, among the giants, but I’m here anyway, hacking away at my keyboard, hoping that somewhere in the mess of my words, there’s something worth keeping. Something that might, just for a moment, feel like it belongs.