Never Meet Your Hero. Ch.1

As they say, being a good person is not a profession.

What is a good person, anyway? It’s a person with many “nots”. They do NOT drink or smoke. They do NOT hurt anyone. They do NOT say “no”. They do NOT cheat or deceive. They do NOT steal. They do NOT gossip or slander. They do NOT trample on others to win.

But there is another side of being a person with many “nots”.

Being a good person is unprofitable. Because a good person is NOT interesting to anyone.

Most people are so arranged that they are attracted by all sorts of trash. Celebrity scandals, crime news and so on. This has always been the case, since the world began; starting with gladiatorial fights in the Ancient Rome, and finishing with trolling and personal attacks in social networks nowadays.

What kind of people usually arouse interest among the opposite gender? Cold-hearted bitches and charismatic jerks do. While good boys and good girls stand modestly aside, waiting until the stars align.

A good person and popularity are  incompatible concepts. Because in the popular environment a good person looks boring at best and ridiculous at worst. God forbid  that they should try to step out of the shadows and get in the way – then they’ll definitely draw fire.

It’s hard for me to say what kind of a person I am. Some people say I am a good one – I guess, proceeding from the fact that I don’t have bad habits, fornicate, gossip, dissemble, trample on others to win or arouse conflicts from scratch, and I try not to hurt anyone even on the Internet.

However, with all this, many of those who know me don’t really like me for some reason.

At the kindergarten kids didn’t want to be friends with me. At school I also felt isolated and ignored. Not because I was a snitch or something. I just didn’t drink or smoke, I wore no make up and stayed away from gossips. I guess, I was too boring to hang out with. A kind of plain Jane.

My name doesn’t mean anything to you. Suppose I am Marina. Actually it is not my real name, but I think it’s better to give you a fictitious name in order to avoid troubles. Just in case.

The thing is I am a writer. Not very popular one, though the few people who read my books say I am gifted. My books are not printed by publishers, even though I’ve been writing for many years. So, it’s not what I do for a living.

It’s rather my hobby. My creative outlet. Because what I’m writing is not mainstream or a ‘hack job’, not fantasy so pulular nowadays – it’s mere non-fictional prose, about my own self and mostly for my own self.

My books are rather my therapy. Splashing out my emotions and putting on paper the events of my life help me, in a way, calm down and put things into some order in my mind – as far as I can, of course.

Many people say I need a counselor. But, firstly, counselors require money for their job, and I don’t really like to pay for doubtful services. Secondly and most importantly, I reckon if a person doesn’t want to help himself, no shrinks will do any good. What is a shrink, anyway? A strange, indifferent man or woman droning on some trivial truths like ‘love yourself” or ‘learn to be self-sufficient’. Kind of  ‘Caprain Obvious’, so why bother?

The tendency to go to counselors, just like a lot of other stuff, has come to our country from the West. Where it’s not really appropriate to burden one’s friends and relatives with one’s problems and bad spirits. If you want to get something off your chest – pay money for it. But why do I pay for what I can do for free – spilling it on paper? The paper, as we know, will endure everything.

Besides, even my books have their readers. For what I write isn’t just about me. Millions people get in similar situations. And, as my favorite writer Chekhov used to say, ‘There is no freak who failed to find his match and there is no nonsense which failed to find it’s reader’.

So, for the most part, I try to write only about real stuff and not to write about what is unreal.

Of course, it hasn’t always been like that. When I was young, writing my first pieces I was really tempted to sugarcoat reality and interveave some fictional details into my story – to make it, as I believed, more interesting and colorful. My plots, indeed, did come out brighter and richer than what had really been – but the book itself, the characters and their behavior would turn out somewhat fake and unnatural. As Stanislavsky used to say: “I don’t believe you!”

I hate falsity in literature. I loathe all those sugary happy endings, cliches of ‘eternal love’, life-and-death struggle for it, ‘wonderful circumstances’ like finding a grand piano in the bushes, heroes and heroines of digital beauty and flawless personalities you can never meet in real life.

I think, writing books about what can never really happen is just like making a soup with concentrates instead of natural meat or mushrooms. Sure, flavor enhances make it taste better. But… but…