The big lesson that my life seems to be trying to teach me lately is: stop trying to force things to be some way other than it actually is. This has been coming up particularly in my writing, where I have been struggling and failing to do something that is, realistically, beyond my current ability right now: to write a bunch of really beautiful, perfect essays.
I have been in denial about my inability to fulfil the height of my creative vision, and that denial has been wreaking havoc on my well-being – psychological, physical, emotional, relational, you name it. Well— that makes it sound a little worse than it is. I’m still in a better place in my life than I’ve been ~95% of the time. I haven’t been truly depressed or anxious or despondent in years. My current “crisis” is much more benign, like the psychological equivalent of a frustrated teacher trying to make a breakthrough with her uncooperative classroom, rather than say a terrified soldier in a warzone watching his buddies get obliterated. Was that a little too dramatic an image to choose? But that’s… how I am. I can be a very intense and dramatic person. I feel like me coming to terms with this has been bringing me closer and closer to writing fiction, but that’s (literally) a story for another day.
In my “ideal life”, or in one particular such vision, I would have written an excellent essay every week since shipping my second book in February 2022. To be a bit more realistic, let’s say one every month. That would’ve been… 18 excellent essays? In reality, I’ve done 2 essays that I feel kinda come close (We were voyagers and Are you serious?) to fulfilling my artistic vision, and even then I can pick them apart and point at all of the things I think aren’t all that great about them.
Something about this feels like defeat and disappointment. As George Orwell said, every book is a failure. But then I am also reminded of… a thread about my twitter follower count. At the start of 2012 I had 287 followers and I hoped to cross 1,000 by the end of the year. I failed! I had gained maybe ~150 followers. In 2013 I tweeted “I JUST WANT 10,000 TWITTER FOLLOWERS FOR BEING A PRETTY PRETTY PRINCESS IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK” – it would take me 6 more years to hit that target. And now in 2023 I have almost 70,000 followers and I don’t even think in terms of follower counts anymore. Now I’m just trying to write some good essays. But I think a similar thing applies in terms of my expectations. I was hoping it would take a year. Realistically, it might take closer to a decade. But the magic is that I might just possibly exceed my expectations tremendously.
I could go on at length. Do I want to? I want to publish something on my substack but I’m not quite sure what. And that’s part of the problem. Maybe here I’ll just think out loud about things I could publish. I’ve started to get a little tired and bored of myself.
I get up in the evenin’
And I ain’t got nothin’ to say
I come home in the mornin’
I go to bed feelin’ the same way
I ain’t nothin’ but tired
Man, I’m just tired and bored with myself
Hey there, baby, I could use just a little help
Dancing in the Dark, Bruce Springsteen, 1984