What's in a Cliché?

I learned about clichés during my first writing workshop back in high school. Flushed with bravado after winning an essay-writing contest, I signed up for a weekend workshop at the local University. I eagerly lugged my collections from as far back as fourth grade, and regaled my amused audience with such contrived metaphors as rose gardens, wafting memories, gaping vortices, and melted wax. There were fifty condescending smiles as the literature professor gave me an hour's worth of caution against hackneyed writing.

I realized then that I was just too ordinary to be a writer. Each word I wrote seemed unoriginal, each sentence an awkward hodgepodge of forced language and false emotions.

Long after I left town for college, I was still scrutinizing words and phrases in my journal, alarmed at the tiniest hint of triteness. I was fixated on the idea of writing something that no once could ever label cliché. When I couldn't, at least to my self-conscious eye, I began to withdraw from writing in general.

I waited for that day when I would experience an event in my life so unlike any other plot documented in literature, that the writer in me would finally take over. I waited and waited, but the waiting all-too-soon became cliché.

My life was cliché.

I fell in love, broke my heart, battled depression, lost control. - All the melodrama was cliché.

I rebelled, left home, lost my way. - The world has witnessed more meaningful tragedies.

I fended for myself, found a great job, met the perfect man, reconciled with my family. - Happy endings have long been written.
There was no place for my trivialities. I simply decided to forget my frustration and throw my passion into my corporate persona.

Last week when I was visiting my parents' place, my mom handed me a half-torn notebook with a tattered cover. She was refurbishing the house and tearing one wall of my childhood room down to make a bigger room for my sister. She found the notebook in my closet and thought I might want to keep it. I did. It was my old journal.

That night, alone in my apartment, I revisited pages and pages of elation, suffering, eagerness, fear, naivety and cynicism. It was a whole history of clichés.

And I was fascinated.

The scenes have been recounted infinite times, the characters old, the ideas perhaps recycled. But the voice that told each story was unique in itself, and it was begging to be heard.

I realize now that by repressing my writing, I was turning into the biggest cliché of all - the quitter.