… I guess I forgot for awhile while I was overextending myself on trades and pretending to be an artist. I think maybe it’s about time I get back to something I’m actually supposedly kind of good at. There’s many lifetimes worth of stories kickin’ around in my head, but one in particular is fleshed out enough for me to actually start telling it. So, once I get things sorted out on the trading front, I may well be going on lengthy hiatus again.
So yeah, I’m gonna try and be writer now. Legend has it that I have some skill at this. I think it was my first grade teacher that wanted me to mention her when I wrote my first novel. And the teacher of one of the last (and greatest) classes I took before the premature end of my high school days noted I had some talent for it, intending to have me take a journalism class the following year.
But alas, I’ve never even had the focus to complete so much as a short story, or even start many. And if you read into the last sentence of the previous paragraph, you know whatever talent I allegedly have is very un-edumacated. I’m out of practice too. I’ve hardly read any books since my mid-teens, and my only effort of note to write (dabbling in fanfiction) about four years ago flamed out after about six chapters. And now I’m going to write a freakin’ novel? Lolwut?
As you can see, I’ve got pretty much nothing going for me here… you may even be thinking I’m delusional. It’s a perfectly reasonable and probably correct assumption. After all, legit mental health issues aside, I’ve spent my 24 years of life skating by on “potential” and have disappointed everyone who has ever seen anything even remotely special in me. My mind burns out on things pathetically easily because I’ve never needed to put much effort into stuff to do well enough to just skate by.
To be honest, I don’t even think I can do this. I have no reason to think so. Nothing in my history says I am even capable of pulling off something even a thousand times easier. I’ll be lucky if I make it past the first chapter (and I’m being generous going that high). But… I have to try to make good here. I hate myself for failing the above mentioned people who thought I had potential (it’s… not a small number). I also hate myself for failing myself. If I had such mythical potential that so many of those people went to ridiculous lengths to try to get me going in the right direction, why am I in such pathetic place in life?
I’ve failed on almost every possible level, and it’s made me very self-loathing and miserable. I’m sick of feeling useless and worthless and helpless and hopeless. Worse, I’m sick of BEING all those things, and more. And for as little as I’ve actually written, writing is the one skill I have enough confidence in to try and make good with. Even if I’m stable enough, I’m never going to have the mental stamina to be able to work 9-5 or do anything tedious (no, writing isn’t tedious to me), so this is what I’ve got. I don’t think I can make good for myself or any of the people I failed in the past in any other way.
I’ve been a miserable shell of a person for over a decade, if not my entire life, but for some reason this summer, I’ve started to come out of it a little bit. Little-by-little, I’ve been finding myself capable of doing things I had no idea I could do.
So… I’m going to try to write now. I have no real expectation of getting anywhere significant with this project, as bad as I want to have some sudden crazy burst of whatever and write the whole thing in a month or two, but I will give it the best effort I can muster. It’s all I can do. Maybe I’ll get a little further than I think, maybe it’ll be a little better than I think. Maybe it’ll suck like Hoover. But even if I only manage to write a page & a half that isn’t very good, it will be better than nothing. It will be something. It will be a start. And maybe I can build on it. I guess I just have to do it, and keep at it for as long as my will can hold out.
~I’m a writer now.
Life and Baseball Cards 